THE CUNNINGHAM LECTURES FOR 1917 
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 



"Nisi poenae fuisset particeps anima, corporibus tantum fuisset 
Redemptor . . . Haec nostra sapientia est, probe sentire quanti 
constiterit Dei filio nostra salus. ,, 

Calvin, Inst. Religionis Christiana, n. xvi. 12. 



THE 

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 

OF RECONCILIATION 



BY THE LATE PRINCIPAL 

JAMES DENNEY, D.D. 

ABTHOR OF "THE DEATH OF CHRIST," "JESUS AND 
THE GOSPEL," ETC. 



The Cunningham Lectures for 1917 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



MAR 30 1918 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

©CI.A492754 






Hs. 



PREFATORY NOTE 



Dr. Denney's illness prevented him from delivering these 
lectures in the spring of the present year. Fortunately, 
however, he had prepared them not only for delivery but 
for publication, and on his death the MS. was found prac- 
tically completed among his papers. One or two passages, 
especially in the notes, to which he had merely pencilled a 
reference in the margin, have been filled in from his note- 
books. An index has also been added. But otherwise the 
text of the MS. is now printed exactly as he -wrote it. 

J. M. 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

The Experimental Basis of the Doctrine .... i 

CHAPTER II 
Reconciliation in the Christian Thought of the Past 26 

CHAPTER III 
The New Testament Doctrine of Reconciliation . . 121 

CHAPTER IV 
The Need of Reconciliation 185 

CHAPTER V 
Reconciliation as Achieved by Christ 233 

CHAPTER VI 
Reconciliation as Realised in Human Life .... 286 

Index 333 

vii 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 
OF RECONCILIATION 



CHAPTER I 

THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

Reconciliation is a term of wide scope and various applica- 
tion, and it is hardly possible to conceive a life or a religion 
which should dispense with it. There is always some kind 
of strain or tension between man and his environment, and 
man has always an interest in overcoming the strain, in re- 
solving the discord in his situation into a harmony, in getting 
the environment to be his ally rather than his adversary. 
The process by which his end is attained may be described 
as one of reconciliation, but whether the reconciliation is 
adequate depends on whether his conception of the environ- 
ment is equal to the truth. Men may be very dimly and 
imperfectly conscious of the nature of the strain which dis- 
quiets f f ieir life, and may seek to overcome it in blind and 
insufficient ways. They may interpret it as physical in its 
origin when it is really ethical, or as the misapprehension of a 
moral order when it is really antagonism to a personal God, 
and in either ease the reconciliation they seek will fail to 
give the peace of which they are in quest. Nevertheless, 
reconciliation and nothing else is what they want, and its 
place in religion is central and vital. 

It may be said that in the widest sense what men crave to 
be reconciled to is life, the conditions of existence in their 
sternness and transiency. Life is short and it is hard, and 
ever since men have thought and felt, they have been exercised 

to 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

with the problem of how to adjust themselves to its laws 
and to find peace. They have a deep sense that life is lost 
when this adjustment is not made, and men live and die 
unreconciled to the very conditions of life. 

"Sed quia semper aves quod abest, praesentia temnis. 
Imperfecta tibi elapsa est ingrataque vita." 1 

Few men have been so profoundly conscious as the great 
poet who wrote these lines, of man's need of reconciliation 
to the very terms on which life is held. He did not seek 
to evade them by any light-hearted pursuit of enjoyment; 
his hope was in science, in the power of thought, in winning 
men to see and accept the inexorable necessities to which 
life is subject, and by accepting to overcome them. We may 
think that this is not much, and that as the necessities are 
inexorable it is all one whether we accept them or not, but 
this is really not true. It makes all the difference in the 
world whether a child accepts the order of the family in 
which he lives as an order not to be questioned, or is per- 
petually resenting it, and the greatest minds of our race have 
found a peace almost too deep for utterance in realising and 
accepting the inevitable order of the world. They are at 
once lost and uplifted in something unimaginably greater 
than themselves, and the words in which they utter their 
experience go deeper than ever plummet sounded. 

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 
Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum 
Subjecit pedibus strepitumque Acheron tis avari." 2 

'Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, iii. 957. See RitschPs definition, iii. 189. 
'Virgil, Georgics, ii. 490-2. 

[2] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

Here is a peace which passes understanding, a great recon- 
ciliation, coveted by the poet and promised to all who 
can master things in their sources, and, realising that they 
are what they are, can accept them as such. Whether 
they achieve it or not, there is an instinct for this peace in 
all human beings. As soon as we know anything we know 
that we are compassed about with necessity, and that to 
accept the necessities which nature lays upon us not only 
gives dignity to our own nature by making us partakers in 
the immensity of the universe, but brings rest and reconcilia- 
tion to our minds. 

If spirits so gifted as Lucretius and Virgil celebrated this 
reconciliation in the ancient world, it has had an even more 
illustrious prophet in modern times in Goethe. Goethe was 
not only a poet but a man of science, and he valued science 
not for its practical applications but for the sense it created 
and fostered of the ultimate oneness of man and the universe 
— in other words, for this peculiar reconciling virtue. In 
spite of frictions and tensions, it was one and the same power 
which revealed itself in the life, constitution, and course of 
nature, and in the being of man. The way to peace was not 
to resist nature, or to pervert it, or to triumph over it, but 
to realise our original and indefeasible unity with it. This 
is the cause, as much as the consequence, of Goethe's devo- 
tion to Spinoza. Nothing could be more congenial to him 
than a writer whose whole mind is summed up in the phrase, 
Quicquid est in Deo est. This was what he felt by instinct, 
and what he wished to see confirmed and illustrated by re- 
flection, and therefore Spinoza was for him the prince of 
philosophers. On the other hand, he had a peculiar antipathy 
to Kant, because Kant was as profoundly conscious of the 
differences in the world as Spinoza of its ultimate unity. By 

[3] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

emphasising these differences, and especially the ultimate 
difference between the physical and the ethical, and between 
right and wrong, with an implacable logical rigour, Kant 
gave the problem of reconciliation new aspects. It became 
far more difficult than when it was regarded merely as the 
problem of adapting oneself to the conditions of existence; 
perhaps in the form which it assumed in the hands of Kant, 
it became not merely difficult but impossible; the only 
philosophy Kant left open to himself was a philosophy of 
antinomies, all problem and no solution. But though the 
pantheistic reconciliation which merely assumes the unity 
of man and nature is less than Christian, it is not worthless 
or unreal. There are problems inevitable to the Christian 
which it has not raised, but on its own ground its value is 
not to be disputed. A truth which moved Lucretius and 
Virgil to the depths of their being, and which is pervasive 
and powerful in Spinoza, Goethe, and Wordsworth, is a truth 
which must have room made for it in every complete doctrine 
of reconciliation. We must have the peace which consists 
in being at one with the world and with the necessities in 
which it enfolds us, as well as the peace of reconciliation in 
the specifically Christian sense. And we must be able to 
bring the two into relation to each other, and to comprehend 
them as one. 

In the ancient world the ideals known to the Greeks as 
drdpa£ta, and airadeia represent something akin to recon- 
ciliation. They represent a life that is untroubled either 
by circumstances, events, or emotions ; and though they lend 
themselves easily to caricature because they easily degenerated 
into pedantry, they bear witness to some of the facts on 
which the need of reconciliation rests. The common life 
of men is restless, troubled, exposed to constant disturbance 

[4] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

both from without and within, and, different as their methods 
were of seeking to reconcile men to the conditions of exist- 
ence, Stoics and Epicureans were far nearer than is often 
admitted in their conception of the end to be attained. 
Both wished to be delivered from what they saw made life 
painful and futile; both wished what might in a large sense 
be called redemption from a "vain conversation," and the 
reconciliation and peace which came in its train. The curious 
mixture of the Stoic and the Epicurean in Montaigne, whom 
a recent biographer describes as Stoicien par Epicureisme^ 
and who alike in his Stoicism and Epicureanism was seeking 
to adjust his life wisely to the conditions of reality, shows the 
affinity of these different tempers. The solutions, however, 
of the problem of life embodied in terms like drapa£la and 
d7rd0€ta, and worked out by rules like avkxov and dirkxov — 
endure and forbear — do not cover in its whole extent 
the need of reconciliation. They are moralising rather 
than ethical. Their interest is too exclusively in the 
individual, and they have too little sense of the original 
unity of man and nature so impressively represented by the 
great poets. 

It is only when we come to the higher forms of religion that 
the problem of reconciliation becomes acute, and the expe- 
rience connected with it well denned. The assumption — 
which is also the experience — of the highest form of religion, 
as we have it represented in the Christian Scriptures, is the 
existence of a personal God and of personal relations between 
that God and man. When these relations are interrupted 
or deranged by man's action, he finds himself alienated or 
estranged from God, and the need of reconciliation emerges. 
The personal God of the Bible is of course the Creator of 
the universe, and estrangement from Him means in a sense 

[5] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

estrangement from everything that is, and demands a recon- 
ciliation of corresponding scope. Still, the heart of the 
reconciliation lies in the readjustment or restoration of the 
true personal relation between God and the creature which 
has lapsed by its own act into alienation from Him ; in other 
words, it consists in the forgiveness of sins. Reconciliation 
to God comes through God's forgiveness of that by which 
we have been estranged from Him; and of all experiences 
in the religion of sinful men, it is the most deeply felt and 
far reaching. We do not need here to measure what is or 
is not within its power, but every one who knows what it is 
to be forgiven, knows also that forgiveness is the greatest 
regenerative force in the life of man. 

Just because the experience of reconciliation is the central 
and fundamental experience of the Christian religion, the 
doctrine of reconciliation is not so much one doctrine as the 
inspiration and focus of all. Hence when any given doctrine 
of reconciliation is criticised, it is through an assumed system 
of Christian truth with which it is alleged to be inconsistent, 
or through some element of such a system. Such and such 
a view, it will be said, is unsound, because it does not enable 
us to do justice to admitted truths about God, or man, or 
the new life, or the Church, or perhaps the teaching or the 
spirit of Jesus. It is therefore not an abnormal but a nat- 
ural and logically inevitable phenomenon that the third and 
constructive volume of Ritschl's great work Rechtfertigung 
und Versohnung widens out into a fairly complete dogmatic 
system. The core of it, under the heading of The Presupposi- 
tions^ contains the doctrines of God, of Sin, and of the Person 
and Work of Christ, which are essential as the basis of the 
Christian doctrine of justification and reconciliation; and a 
further proof is attempted both that the forgiveness of sins 

[6] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

is essential if God's ends with men are to be attained, and 
that this forgiveness is necessarily based on the work and 
passion of Christ. There is something surprising in the 
appearance of such speculative discussions as these last in 
the work of a writer who is ordinarily so much of a mere 
positivist in theology as Ritschl, but they indicate the vital 
importance of reconciliation both as an experience and a 
doctrine. Everything is essentially related to it, and the 
feeling is inevitable that a thing so vital could not be other- 
wise than as it is. The more wonderful and essential it is, 
the less do we feel at liberty to say that it might have come 
to us in some other way than that in which it actually has 
come. Rather are we convinced that there is a divine neces- 
sity in all that belongs to it; and though it may seem pre- 
sumptuous to speak of necessity where God is in question, 
we must remember that the only alternative is to pronounce 
God ex lex — without law — which is as good as to abandon 
thinking altogether. It is not the intention of the writer 
to elaborate a system of theology, on the scale of Ritschl's, 
round the doctrine of reconciliation; the examination of 
what is presupposed in the doctrine will be confined as far 
as possible to a study of the nature of sin. But he would 
insist that in the experience of reconciliation to God through 
Christ is to be found the principle and the touch-stone of all 
genuine Christian doctrine: whatever can be derived from 
this experience and is consistent with it is true and necessary ; 
whatever is incompatible with it lacks the essential Christian 
character. 

It is a commonplace of modern theology that no doctrine 
has any value except as it is based on experience, and before 
proceeding to the Christian doctrine of reconciliation, it is 
indispensable to look at the experience or experiences which 

[7] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

are covered by the term. 1 The differentia of Christian recon- 
ciliation is that it is inseparable from Christ : it is dependent 
on Him and mediated through Him. But Christ Himself 
and all the reconciling virtue associated with Him are them- 
selves mediated to us in numberless ways. He works upon 
us in the way of reconciliation through all the institutions, 
customs, convictions, and characters which make up the 
Christian world in which we live. In what is called Christen- 
dom we have the benefit of an atmosphere ultimately due 
to Him, and impregnated with what are in the last resort 
powers of reconciliation originally embodied in Him. But 
though this is important it is not the main thing. The main 
thing — in the sense of that through which the reconciling 
power of Christ mainly enters with effect into the lives of 
sinful men — is the New Testament witness to Jesus. It is 
admitted, as has just been said, that this reaches us indirectly 
in ways which can never be fully traced, but it is most power- 
ful when the mediation is most direct. An evangelist who 
has himself been reconciled to God through Christ, and who 
can make the New Testament witness to the reconciling 
power of Jesus his own, is a far more powerful minister of 
reconciliation than any institution or atmosphere can be. 
The sense of responsibility for reconciliation, the duty of 
being reconciled, do not become urgent except under a direct 
and personal appeal. A reconciled man, preaching Christ 
as the way of reconciliation, and preaching Him in the temper 
and spirit which the experience of reconciliation creates, is 
the most effective mediator of Christ's reconciling power. It 
is hardly another thing than this if we say that the recon- 
ciling power is most effectively mediated through the New 

1 "Es ist unmoglich das Object der Religion auf ausserreligiosem Wege zu 
erreichen," Troltsch, Zeitschrift fur Theologie u. Kirche, 1895, p. 432 f. 

[8] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

Testament. For when we read the New Testament with 
susceptible minds, we listen to the voice of those who were 
once themselves estranged from God, but have been recon- 
ciled to Him through Christ, and are letting us into the 
secret of their new life; it is the nearest approach we can 
make, and therefore the most vital, to the reconciling power 
which streamed from Christ Himself. It might be objected 
to this view that it connects reconciliation too closely with 
the historical Christ, who stands at an immense and ever in- 
creasing distance from us; His power, it might be feared, 
would grow continually less with time just as a light, though 
it may still burn as brightly, grows dim with increasing 
distance. But this is not the Christian view. There is 
certainly no reconciliation but through the historical Christ: 
there is no other Christ of whom we know anything whatever. 
But the historical Christ does not belong to the past. The 
living Spirit of God makes Him present and eternal; and it 
is not from Palestine, or from the first century of the Christian 
era, but here and now that His reconciling power is felt. 

Personal relations are inexhaustible, and it would be idle 
to try to exhaust the ways in which Christ acts on a sinful 
man for reconciliation when they come face to face with each 
other through the New Testament or through the preaching 
of the gospel. But it is possible to indicate some of the lines 
along which impressions come. 

When we see Jesus as He is presented to us in the gospels, 
we see a life which is at one with God. All the problems 
which distract and baffle us are solved here. There is no 
quarrel with the conditions of existence. There is no dis- 
content, or querulousness, or rebellion. There is no radical 
inconsistency, no humbling division of the soul against 
itself. There is no distrust of God, no estrangement from 

[9] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Him, no sense of sin. In one way it might seem incredible — 
it is so purely supernatural when compared with what we 
know as nature in ourselves and others; yet incredible as 
it might seem, it has never failed to impress men as abso- 
lutely real and at the same time as truly human. It is our 
life that we see in Jesus, but we see it in its truth and as it 
ought to be, a life in God, wholly at one with Him. This 
life is its own witness, and there is no human soul to which 
it does not appeal. Perhaps we do not need to distinguish 
too scrupulously the modes in which the appeal comes home 
to us. It may act like a spell or a charm on our whole nature 
at once, drawing us by an irresistible constraint to Jesus. 
We may be conscious in it of a grace which ensures our wel- 
come when we approach, and of an authority which requires 
our implicit submission. We may have an unanalysed feeling 
that here "all's love and all's law," but through everything 
we are conscious that the very presence of such a Being in 
our world is a promise of reconciliation. He is not here 
for Himself, but for us. There is invitation in His presence 
as in His voice : it is as though He were saying all the time, 
"Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and 
I will give you rest." When we really see Him, and virtue 
goes out of Him to heal us, we cry irrepressibly, "Thou, O 
Christ, art all I want; more than all in Thee I find." We 
do not stay to ask what He has done or what He can do for 
us; what He is — not according to a doctrine of His person, 
but in the rich and simple reality we see in the evangelists — 
is enough for us. He is our peace. The whole promise 
and power of reconciliation are in Him, and we know without 
proving that He can bring us to God and save to the utter- 
most. 

But the whole experience of reconciliation may not be 

[10] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

made at once. There are probably many who are first im- 
pressed by the power of Jesus to reconcile men to the general 
conditions of existence. Their hearts have been set intently 
and passionately on things which some can only have if 
others want them — on wealth, on worldly honour, on present 
and visible success of various kinds; and it gradually dawns 
upon them in the presence of Jesus that here is the perfect 
life, and that with all these things it has no concern what- 
ever. It is absolutely independent of them. It recognises 
in them difficulties and temptations, sometimes it might seem 
sheer impossibilities, in the path of those who would live the 
life which is life indeed; but at the same time it can deliver 
us from them. It reveals behind the world of pleasure, 
pride, and covetousness another world which is the true 
country of the soul, the world of the beatitudes; and when 
it wins men to dwell there, and to know what it is to be 
poor in spirit and meek and merciful and lovers of righteous- 
ness and of peace, it has reconciled them to much that was 
once irksome and intolerable in the order of the common 
world. When we learn, as the life of Jesus enables us to 
do, that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of 
the things which he possesses, that though lived on the plane 
of nature it is essentially a spiritual life, much that once 
estranged us from God and from the conditions of existence 
dies away. We can accept much with which we were once 
at war, because we are independent of it. This does not 
mean that we should have no economic ideals for ourselves or 
for society, or that no outward conditions have any meaning 
for the life of the soul. It means what we see when we look 
at Jesus : namely, that as far as true eternal life is concerned 
it can be enjoyed in all its fulness by one who takes no inter- 
est and has no part in the ordinary ambitions and conflicts 

en] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

of men. Something far finer than the drapa^a and dTr&flcta 
of ancient moralists, something which reaches deeper and has 
a greater power to reconcile man to life, enters into all who 
absorb the beatitudes as they are illustrated and embodied 
in Jesus Himself. 

Sometimes this aspect of reconciliation is not adequately 
recognised. The term is restricted too narrowly to a trans- 
action in the sphere of conscience. But the end of reconcilia- 
tion is to make saints, and no life impresses us as saintly 
unless it reflects, however obscurely, the glory of the beati- 
tudes. We are not really reconciled to God through Jesus 
unless we are reconciled to this as the true life, and we are 
not reconciled to this as the true life unless we are reconciled 
to renouncing all the passion with which when we were 
ignorant of it we sought the chief ends of life elsewhere. 

Important, however, as this aspect of reconciliation is, it 
must not distract us from what is central: the reconciling 
power of Jesus as exhibited in His attitude to sinners. It is 
sin which estranges us from God, and creates the problem of 
reconciliation. It is sin which hides God's face from us, 
and tempts us to shun His presence. It is sin which provokes 
His displeasure, and which makes us fear, distrust, and 
finally hate Him. In the gospels, indeed, we do not find 
any of this abstract language. They do not even speak of 
sin in the singular number, as an idea, but only of sins in 
the plural, as definite acts. It is not by any doctrine that 
we are reconciled to God; the reconciling power for sinful 
men lies in the attitude of Jesus to the sinful. This is happily 
one of the points in the gospel story about which there can 
be no dispute. There might be a question as to whether 
Jesus spoke any given word assigned to Him, or as to the 
circumstances in which it was spoken, or as to its proper 

[12] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

application; but it is quite inconceivable that the evangelists 
should misrepresent so new and wonderful a thing as the 
attitude of Jesus to the sinful, or the reconciling power which 
accompanied it. Jesus knew what sin was more truly than 
any man. He saw it in its roots and in its consequences. 
But He believed in forgiveness. He not only believed in it 
and proclaimed it, He embodied and bestowed it. The words 
of His enemies — "This man receiveth sinners and eateth with 
them" — though spoken malignantly, enshrine the ultimate 
truth of His life and work, and it is through this truth that 
His reconciling power is felt. The value of His teaching is 
not questioned. Parables like that of the prodigal son, 
whose father ran and fell on his neck and kissed him, or of 
the two debtors who had nothing to pay, and whose creditor 
freely forgave them both, can never lose their power to evoke 
penitence and faith, and through them to reconcile sinners 
to God. But far beyond the teaching of Jesus in reconciling 
power, inspired and divine as that teaching is, stands His 
actual intercourse with the sinful. Here He appears in act 
as the minister and mediator of reconciliation, and when we 
realise what He is doing, the possibility, the reality, and the 
nature of reconciliation are made plain to us. They are 
made plain at least if we realise through the power of God's 
Spirit that Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, 
and if He inspires in us that same penitence and faith which 
He won from the sinners He received on earth. 

The evangelist who records the Pharisaic sneer — "This 
man receiveth sinners" — is rich in illustrations of it which 
enable us to see what reconciliation to God through Christ 
implies. One is the story in Luke vii. 36-50, of the woman 
who was a sinner. Apparently she was a sinner in the city, 
one of that unhappy class who walk the streets and live by 

[13] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

sin. There are none in the world more friendless, none from 
whom the passers by more instinctively turn aside, none 
whom ordinary society would be so determined not to receive ; 
in a word, none so hopeless. But one day this woman heard 
Jesus, and His holiness and love overcame her. She was 
drawn irresistibly to Him, and not long after, as He sat at 
meat in a Pharisee's house, she made her way in, and, stand- 
ing behind Him, wet His feet with tears, wiped them with 
the hair of her head, kissed them over and over again, and 
anointed them with ointment. "What an extraordinary 
demonstration!" we are tempted to say. Was it hysterics, 
the weakness of a breaking wave? No, it was not hysterics, 
it was regeneration. It was the new birth of faith and hope 
and love, evoked and welcomed by Jesus: it was the pas- 
sionate experience of a sinner's reconciliation to God. Such 
a thing is possible, for here we actually see it. Jesus did not 
shrink from the sinful woman: He received her. He took 
her part against the Pharisee. He spoke great and gracious 
words in her defence. "Her sins are forgiven, for she loved 
much." "Thy faith hath saved thee: go in peace." And 
as she went, she knew that friendless as she had been before 
she had now a friend with God; it is not too much to say, 
she knew that God Himself was her friend. We see from 
this incident what a profound, thrilling, and far reaching 
experience reconciliation is. It is something which moves 
nature in all its depths, which melts it and casts it into a 
new mould. It regenerates the soul which passes through 
it, and it is accompanied with the sense of an infinite debt 
to Jesus. How this last is to be explained we are not express- 
ly told, but it was not for nothing that the sinful woman 
restored to God poured out her gratitude at Jesus' feet. 
We have another instance of Jesus receiving sinners in 

[H] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

the story of Zacchseus (Luke xix. iff.). Zacchaeus was hated 
for his trade, and he was hated more for his success in it; 
he was rich, and he had made his money in what all his 
countrymen thought a disreputable way. He had not a 
friend in Jericho. But as Jesus passed under the tree into 
which Zacchseus had climbed to see Him, He looked up and 
said, "Zacchseus, make haste and come down; for to-day 
I must abide at thy house." Respectable people would not 
call on Zacchseus, but the Lord called on him. And that day 
salvation came to his house. It was the rising up of the 
new life in Zacchseus, the life inspired by the presence of 
Jesus under his roof, which declared itself as he exclaimed, 
"Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and 
if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation 
I restore him fourfold." There is no boast in this, no resent- 
ful clearing of his character against the people who murmured 
that Jesus was gone to be guest with a man that was a sinner, 
no assertion that he had been unjustly accused. It is the 
new man who speaks here, and who reveals in this regenerate 
utterance what the coming of Jesus meant for him. Salva- 
tion came to his house when Jesus entered it. He brought 
with Him the power which reconciled Zacchseus to God, 
and in the very same act or process delivered him from his 
old sin of covetousness and made him a new creature. This 
experience is not separable from the sinner's reconciliation ; it 
is part and parcel of it, and is the visible proof that it is real. 
In both these cases, and one may say in all others that 
the gospel records, it is important not to forget that Jesus 
was present, and that it was His presence which made pos- 
sible all the experiences which are included under recon- 
ciliation or regeneration. This is sometimes overlooked by 
those who are jealous for what they call free forgiveness. 

[15] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Thus a recent writer on this subject says, "The free forgive- 
ness of sins was the vital spark of Christ's teaching. Thy 
sins be forgiven thee.' Wherever He found repentance, 
there He scattered forgiveness; it was as water to the tender 
plant." 1 The simplest answer to this is to say that Jesus 
did not "find" repentance at all. It was not there ready 
made, waiting for forgiveness. He had to create or evoke 
repentance, and there was something in His character and 
in His attitude to the sinful which worked powerfully to 
this end. The sense of debt to Jesus on the part of Zacchseus 
and of the woman who was a sinner, would not have been 
what it evidently was if they had merely owed to Him 
an announcement or even an assurance that penitence like 
theirs could not but be forgiven. Their penitence itself was 
not an antecedent condition of reconciliation, made good on 
their part, without any obligation to Him; it was simply an 
element in the reconciliation, and they were His debtors for it 
as for everything else in that transforming experience. This, 
it may be said with confidence, is what is confirmed by experi- 
ence still. We do not first repent of our sins and then come to 
Jesus; it is the visitation of our life by Jesus to which we 
owe first repentance and then all other spiritual blessings. 

From this point of view we hardly need to raise the ques- 
tion whether there is any special relation between the death of 
Jesus and man's reconciliation to God. It is Jesus Himself 
who is our peace, and wherever we meet Him reconciling 
virtue goes out of Him. We may say indifferently that it is 
concentrated in His death, because there the spirit of His 
life is condensed and f ocussed ; or that it is diffused through- 
out His life, because from every word or incident of His 
life there breathes forth on us the spirit in which He died. 

1 Forgiveness and Suffering, by Douglas White, M.D., p. 68. 

[16] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

But while we must guard against unreal distinctions, and 
especially against turning the death of Christ into a thing 
which can be looked at materially rather than personally, 
we must not ignore the fact that of all things which go to 
make up the life of Jesus His death is the most wonderful 
in reconciling power. To avoid the mistake just referred 
to, we may speak rather of Jesus in His death than of the 
death of Jesus. Jesus in His death has been the supreme 
power by which men have been reconciled to God. It is as 
the crucified that He has been able to create in sinners God's 
thoughts of sin, to evoke penitence, to inspire faith, to bring 
men back to the Father. It is not a doctrine, but a fact of 
human experience that this is so, and if we try to analyse the 
reconciling virtue which dwelt in Jesus we must do justice 
to this fact. Nothing forbids us to acknowledge the subduing 
power of love everywhere — and to be subdued by love is 
to be reconciled. Nothing forbids us to feel that there is 
something which at once overcomes and reconciles when we 
see Jesus at Jacob's well, and become conscious of the truth 
in Quaerens me sedisti lassus. But this cannot forbid us 
recognising the further truth — or, if it is not a further truth, 
the deeper sounding in the same truth — in Redemisti crucem 
passus. If the mistake has sometimes been made of speaking 
of Christ's death as a thing by itself which could be studied 
and appreciated, and even preached as gospel, apart either 
from Jesus or His life, we must not in avoiding it fall into 
the opposite error, and think that we can appreciate Jesus 
fully, even in His character of reconcilei, though we do not 
think of Him in His cross and passion. The place given 
to the death of Christ in the New Testament peremptorily 
forbids this to the Christian reader. 

When we think of the experience of reconciliation in its 

[17] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

dependence on the cross of Jesus there are two observations 
we cannot but make. The first is that it is never really 
separated in our minds from the whole story of the gospel, 
with all those moving words and incidents which are as much 
part of the life of Jesus as of His death. It is love which 
prevails against every form of evil in us — against pride, a 
hard heart, sensual passions, or whatever else ; and the whole 
story is a demonstration of love. We see Jesus from begin- 
ning to end of it thinking of others, not of Himself. "If ye 
seek me, let these go" (John xviii. 8). "Daughters of Jeru- 
salem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your 
children" (Luke xxiii. 28). "Father, forgive them, for they 
know not what they do" (Luke xxiii. 34). "Verily I say unto 
thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise" (Luke xxiii. 
43). These words and their accompaniments get behind all 
the sinner's defences against God. We feel that in the very 
face of sin at its guiltiest, a love revealed and maintained it- 
self against which sin was powerless. In the dreadful conflict 
the victory remained with love. Love proved itself in the 
Passion of Jesus to be the final reality, and no truth which 
takes possession of the heart of man can ever have power to 
subdue and reconcile like this. If we wish to experience or 
to preach reconciliation — which depends upon such love — 
we must not lose the revelation of it by reducing it to a 
symbol, like the cross, or a dogma, like that of satisfaction : 
we must keep before ourselves and others the concrete facts 
in which its reality first came home to men. Christ crucified 
must be "evidently set forth" — placarded (Gal. iii. 1) before 
men's eyes — that they may receive a due impression of all 
that there is in this wonderful sight. 

The second observation is this. The story of the death 
of Christ never reaches us but through Christian tradition. 

[18] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

Christian parents and teachers introduce us to it, and when 
we are able to do so we go directly to the New Testament 
itself, the purest witness to the Christian tradition. The 
consequence is that we never see the death of Jesus as a * 
mere spectacle, a purely objective or external event. We 
see it through eyes which have felt it, which have filled with 
tears as they gazed upon it. We see it through the emotions * 
and experiences of those who have been subdued by it, and 
who cannot speak of it without telling us what it means, 
and how it works in surrendered souls. There is no pro- 
portion, it may be said, between what the disciples saw at 
the cross, and what they afterwards said about it; between 
the squalid horror of an ordinary military execution and 
the presence there of a power which should reconcile the 
world to God. We do not need to discuss at this point the 
soundness of their perception. The point is that as they 
looked at Jesus on His cross this actually was their experi- 
ence: they became conscious through Him of a love which 
passes knowledge; it flashed out from His passion and over- 
came them; they were suddenly aware of a goodness which 
outweighed all the sin of the world and made it impotent; 
and through that goodness, or rather through Him in whose 
passion it was manifested to men, they were reconciled to 
God. Now when we say that the story of the death of Christ 
never reaches us but through Christian tradition, we mean 
that it never reaches us but in the atmosphere of this inter- * 
pretation. From the first, when we learn that Jesus died, we 
learn that He died for us. As the children's hymn has it, 

"He died that we might be forgiven, 
He died to make us good, 
That we might go at last to heaven, 
Saved by His precious blood." 

[19] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

No person born and brought up in Christendom can so much 
as see the death of Christ except through an atmosphere per- 
meated and impregnated with this interpretation of it. 
When the interpretation becomes formal, it may easily be- 
come inadequate, but what it rests on is the experience that 
in the death of Jesus the sinful soul has come face to face 
with a love which is stronger than sin. It is not sin which 
is the last reality in the world, nor any consequence of 
sin; it is not sin to which we have to reconcile ourselves, or 
sin's punishments, temporal or eternal. The last reality is 
beyond sin. It is a love which submits to all that sin can 
do, yet does not deny itself, but loves the sinful through it 
all. It is a love which in Scripture language bears sin, yet 
receives and regenerates sinners. All this is included in the 
reconciliation of sinners to God through Christ, and just 
because it has been from the beginning a matter of experi- 
ence, not a dogma, it is quite legitimate that its influence 
should be felt in the simplest Christian teaching. We do not 
preach that Jesus died, but that He died for us, and in par- 
ticular that He died for our sins. The love revealed in His 
death is revealed signally in relation to them, and there is no 
simpler way of describing the effect of His death than to say 
that it dispels the despairing conviction that for us sin is the 
last of all things, in which we must hopelessly acquiesce, and 
evokes the inspiring conviction that the last of all things is 
sin-bearing love through which the sinner may be reconciled 
to God. 1 

1 One of the difficulties in writing about reconciliation, so far as it involves 
reference to the views of others, is that the worth of the common Christian 
interpretation of Christ's death as a reconciling death is admitted even by 
those who seem to repudiate every doctrinal statement of it which has ever 
been attempted from St. Paul down. It is not easy to make any criticism 
of a book on the atonement or on reconciliation which the author may not 

[20] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

There are two considerations further which should not be 
overlooked at this point. The reconciliation which is experi- 
enced through the sin-bearing love revealed in Christ has, like 
everything in the Christian religion, the character of absolute- 
ness or finality. When we are constrained by this love we 
are irresistibly and completely constrained. We cannot and 
need not think of anything beyond it: that there should be 
anything beyond it is inconceivable. "Thou, O Christ, art 
all I want; more than all in Thee I find," is the spontaneous 
utterance of the reconciled sinner. The love he has met in 
Christ is wholly inexorable to sin, and wholly gracious to 
those who surrender to it, and it is in this twofold character 
that it is an absolutely reconciling love. The condemnation 
and repulsion of sin in it are just as unequivocal as the 
welcome given to the sinner. They are indeed part of it, 
and no one reconciled to God through Christ who died could 
ever imagine either that God ignored or condoned sin, or 
that he was called through reconciliation to anything but a 
life of unreserved obedience and holiness. Reconciliation as 
experienced has its outlook on a new life, and no doctrine 
of it is adequate in which this is not explicitly recognised. 

From a very early time — perhaps from the time of St. 
Paul himself — the sense that reconciliation was a great 
achievement, involving effort or tension of some kind even on 
the part of God, has played a considerable part in theologis- 
ing on this subject. In forgiving sins, it might be said, God 
takes sides with us against Himself; He has a right to exact 
something from us, and for our sakes forgoes that right. 

plausibly represent as unjust. Naturally the New Testament writers have 
suffered most at the hands of theologians who believed that at heart they 
were at one with them, who wanted to have the New Testament on their 
side, but who could not find the apostolic way of expounding the reconciling 
death of Christ congenial. 

[21] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

His justice impels Him in one direction, and His mercy in 
another, and in this very act of pardoning men and recon- 
ciling them to Himself He must reconcile these divergent 
attributes. It is certainly part of the experience of recon- 
ciliation that God treats us better than we deserve. He does 
not deal with us after our sins, nor reward us according to 
our iniquities. It is also part of the experience of reconcilia- 
tion to feel that such a display of God's mercy is miraculous ; 
it is not something we could presume upon, but the most 
wonderful work of Him who alone does wonderful things. 
It is the characteristic of God in which He is incomparable. 
"Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity 4 ?" 
But it is not a part of the experience to feel that there is a 
conflict between the divine attributes of justice and mercy, 
and that these attributes have to be reconciled to one another 
before man can be reconciled to God. A good deal of specu- 
lation deals with this idea, but it is speculative, not experi- 
mental. There is not in Christian experience any antagonism 
between justice and mercy: they are in active and immut- 
able harmony with each other, and God always — not merely 
in forgiving sins — acts in unison with both. Mercy and 
justice do not need to be reconciled, for they are never at 
war. The true opposite of justice is not mercy, but injustice, 
with which God can have nothing to do either in reconcilia- 
tion or in any other of His works. 

The experience of reconciliation is bound up with other 
convictions which must not be overlooked, even though they 
only rise into consciousness casually, and cannot be reduced to 
any system. One of these convictions is that from beginning 
to end the work is carried on in the moral world. The power 
which Christ exercises in reconciling us to God is a moral 
power, not a physical or magical one, and in its operation it 

[22] 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

is subject to the laws of a moral order. This not only means 
that there is no physical coercion in it, no denial of man's 
freedom, but that the power itself which reconciles is ethical 
in quality. But to say this is to say — when we speak of the 
man Christ Jesus — that it is power which has been ethically 
earned and accumulated. The moral personality in which 
it is lodged and out of which it proceeds, has been formed 
and developed, like other moral personalities, through the 
duties and trials of our common human life. It could not 
have been formed and developed in any other way. This is 
the truth underlying some rather equivocal expressions which 
have been used about the work of Christ in the reconcilia- 
tion of man to God. One of the most embarrassing of these 
expressions is that which speaks of the merit or the merits 
of Christ. When we use it, we seem to think of some thing, 
detachable from the moral personality of Jesus and from its 
moral power, and capable of being attached or credited to 
some other person or persons. But in reality there is no such 
thing, and therefore it is an unreal question to ask whether 
Christ merited for Himself as well as for others, or for others 
only. It is an unreal question, because it can only be asked 
by leaving the moral world behind us, in which the whole 
being and power of Christ are realised. The only legitimate 
idea suggested by the term "merit"— and this holds when it 
is applied to sinners as well as to the Saviour — is that the 
whole business of salvation is transacted in the moral world. 
It is not a happy term to express this idea; it is a legal 
term for a moral value, and therefore inadequate and mis- 
leading; but this amount of truth it can be made to cover. 
All that Jesus did He did in fulfilment of His calling; He 
could not have done otherwise and been true to Himself. 
But while the experience of reconciliation as entirely ethical, 

[233 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

alike in the power which produces it and in its fruits, compels 
us to say this, it may be questioned whether it is a fair 
equivalent of this when we are asked to say that Christ 
did nothing for others that He did not first do for Himself. 
Experience of reconciliation does not prompt or support a 
statement like this. On the contrary, Christ did something 
for us which He had not to do for Himself; He reconciled 
us to God. But in the whole work of reconciliation, in His 
obedience and in His passion, we may say, if we choose to 
employ legal terminology, that He "merited" for Himself ; 
He did the will of His Father — fulfilled the calling with 
which the Father had called Him — and so merited His 
approval and reward. But outside of Christ's fulfilment of 
His calling, on which His moral power as reconciler depends, 
there are no quasi-material "merits" of Christ which are 
available for others because He does not need them Him- 
self. Nowhere in the moral universe, and just as little in 
Christ as anywhere, is there room for the idea of superero- 
gation. 

There is much about reconciliation which experience does 
not demonstrate, because experience is never complete. A 
man may be assured that the reconciliation to God which He 
owes to Christ is final and absolute, yet have much to learn 
about the consequences of sin. All he knows about these 
consequences to begin with is that, be they what they may, 
they cannot and do not negate the reconciliation. But he 
has to learn by further experience how the healing power of 
reconciliation works in a sin-stricken nature, and, though 
he can never be reconciled to sin, whether there are not by 
the will of God painful and disabling consequences of sin 
to which in the meantime he must resign himself as patiently 
and unmurmuringly as he can. He has to learn what the 

[Ml 



THE EXPERIMENTAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

standing temper of the reconciled life will be in his own case. 
It may be determined in part by his natural temperament, 
in part by his past life, in part by the completeness with which 
he has received the reconciliation ; it may be more triumphant 
or more subdued, more akin to joy in the Holy Spirit or to 
"getrostetes Siindenelend" ; but it does not affect the recon- 
ciliation itself. Most men after they receive the gospel have 
much to learn of the scope of reconciliation. They do not 
realise how much God covers, and that reconciliation to Him 
has not had its perfect work until we are reconciled also to 
our fellows, to the order of providence, and to the inexorable 
laws of the spiritual world. 

Of one thing, however, there is never any question: the 
place of Jesus is the reconciliation. He is our Peace. 



USl 



CHAPTER II 

RECONCILIATION IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF 

THE PAST 

All sound and legitimate doctrinal construction must be 
based on experience, and it is to such experiences as have 
been described in the previous chapter that we must refer 
all attempts at dogmatic definition. It has been recognised 
in that chapter that the reconciling power of Jesus is mediated 
to us in the last resort by the primitive testimony to Him 
in the New Testament, and it can hardly be questioned that 
in the New Testament there is not merely a testimony to 
Jesus, and a record of experiences due to Him, but a great 
deal of reflection upon Him. Accordingly it has become al- 
most a convention with theological writers to start with a dis- 
cussion of the New Testament doctrine, or of the New Testa- 
ment types or suggestions of doctrine, whatever be the subject 
in hand. But there are reasons for adopting a different 
course. We should not indeed count among these that ad- 
vanced by an American theologian, that to regard Scripture 
as the sole source and norm for Christian theology "is in- 
compatible with the idea, now gaining considerable accept- 
ance, that later types of Christianity have a significance in 
some degree comparable with New Testament types, and so 
it is not the truest way to maintain the value of the Scrip- 
tures themselves." 1 Primitive historical Christianity must 

1 Lyman, American Journal of Theology, Oct. 1915, p. 608. 

[26] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

always be essentially normative, and if later types of religion 
so diverge from the primitive type as to find the New Tes- 
tament rather an embarrassment than an inspiration, the 
question they raise is whether they can any longer be recog- 
nised as Christian. But apart from such radical and ques- 
tionable ideas there are good grounds for looking at the 
course of Christian thought in general before specially in- 
vestigating the thought of the New Testament. One is that 
Christians had begun to think and to express themselves on 
the subject before the New Testament as we know it had 
been canonised and established in its present authority in 
the Church. Another is that it was long before Christians 
thinking on reconciliation had any idea of the wealth of New 
Testament reflection on the subject. The New Testament 
contains in a great variety of forms testimony to Jesus as 
the reconciler, and to His gospel as the word of reconcilia- 
tion — we can apply to it, as the writer to the Hebrews applies 
to the Old Testament, the terms TroXu/xepws Kai ttoXutpottcos; 
and as this testimony came to men in one form or another, 
along one channel or another, it evoked faith and other 
Christian experiences, including Christian reflections, which 
last can hardly be said to be dependent on what we mean 
when we speak of the New Testament. It is well worth 
while, holding the latter in reserve, to survey the course of 
Christian thought independently. 

It is beyond the scope of these lectures, however, to do 
this in minute detail. At a comparatively early date the 
Christian Church hammered out, for better or worse, dogmas 
of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the history of these 
dogmas has an almost official character and can with com- 
parative ease be made plain. But the Church has never 
had in the same sense a dogma of reconciliation. There is 

[27] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

nothing in the history of Christian thought on this subject 
analogous to the definition of the byaovaiov at Nicsea. It 
was not till after the Reformation, when dogma in the old 
sense had become impossible, that the various branches of 
the Church began to frame explicit official statements about 
the way in which Christ reconciled man to God, and espe- 
cially about the meaning of His sufferings and death. But 
this does not mean that there was no Christian thinking on 
the subject. There was a great deal, at first independent and 
casual, but afterwards starting from and controlled by the 
orthodox doctrine of the Person of Christ. What is intended 
in this chapter is not to give an account of everything that 
theologians have incidentally or expressly said upon the sub- 
ject, but only to indicate the main types of interpretation 
which have emerged in the course of Christian history. 1 

1 Besides the histories of doctrine generally, like those of Thomasius, 
Harnack, and Seeberg, in which, of course, it finds a place, important books 
have been written expressly upon the subject. One is Baur's Christian 
Doctrine of Reconciliation in its historical development from the earliest times 
to the most recent (1838). Another is the first volume of Ritschl's Justification 
and Reconciliation, the first edition of which appeared in 1870. These books 
are typical of their authors. Baur operates a great deal with the categories 
of the Hegelian philosophy, and subdues the movement of Christian thought 
to them with astonishing skill and occasional violence. He devotes the first 
section of his work to the period from the earliest days to the beginning of 
the twelfth century (Anselm) ; Ritschl refers to this period in his introduc- 
tion, but virtually starts with Anselm as the first writer who raised questions 
on the subject in such a form that the answers yielded material for doctrine. 
Both aim at tracing a natural sequence or genealogical connection in the 
ideas which emerge in history, and both, it may be said without offence, tend, 
as they approach their own time, to disappear in the sand. Instead of a gene- 
alogy of ideas we get precis of books, and even of controversial pam- 
phlets, in which the writers are so earnestly engaged in clearing up their rela- 
tions to one another that the interest of reconciliation to God is lost. Besides 
these reference may be made to Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atone- 
ment (1st ed. 1865), and to the learned work of the Abbe J. Riviere, Le 
Dogme de la Redemption: Essai d'Etude Historique (2nd ed. 1905), completed 
by Le Dogme de la Redemption: Etude Theologique (1914). In attempting 

[28] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

In primitive Christianity two ideas are universally con- 
nected with the death of Christ, and employed in its inter- 
pretation. It is spoken of as a sacrifice and as a ransom. 
The first of these finds its application more readily if our 
main thought is that of man's reconciliation to God through 
Christ and His Passion; the second, if our main thought is 
that man owes to Christ and His Passion emancipation from 
some evil or hostile power. But it is necessary to look at 
both more closely. 

Sacrifice in the forms in which it was familiar to ancient 
religion is quite unknown to us, and it is therefore hard for 
us to understand. Pious people in ancient times took it for 
granted; it was assumed to have some meaning or power, 
and no questions were asked about it. For us, it is merely 
a subject for questions, and the literature in which it has been 
investigated is of vast extent. Much of this literature and 
of its conclusions is irrelevant to our present study. When it 
is pointed out, for example, that in an ancient religion sacri- 
fice was merely the normal mode of worship, and that it had 
no particular relation to sin or its removal, it is enough to re- 
ply that when the death of Christ is spoken of as a sacrifice, it 
always has precisely this relation. It is a sacrifice for sin, 
and not a sacrifice in any vaguer sense. Its value is that 
somehow or other it neutralises sin as a power estranging 
man and God, and that in virtue of it God and man are recon- 
ciled. In all probability, by the first century of the Christian 
era, all sacrifices among the Jews had this character of being 
expiatory or propitiatory sacrifices; whatever the modus, the 
effect was that they purged or put away sin. 1 It is quite 

to indicate in outline the course of Christian thought on the subject of these 
lectures, the writer ventures to assure his readers that he gives no account at 
second hand of books which he has not read. 

^oltzmann, N. T. Theologie (first ed.), 64 ff. 302. 

[29] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

obvious that immoral ideas might easily gather round the 
practice of sacrifice. Dull consciences might regard the sac- 
rifice as a bribe by which God was won over to disregard 
what justice would have required Him to punish. Protests 
against the misunderstanding and abuse of sacrifice, as if it 
implied that the sinner could buy himself out of the due con- 
sequences of his sin, are as universal in ancient religions as 
sacrifice itself. Here Isaiah and Plato, the Psalter and 
Seneca are at one. In sacrifice, we are warned, it is not the 
mere thing which is looked at, but the mind of the offerer. 
"Ne in victimis quidem" says Seneca, "licet opimcz sint au~ 
roque praefulgeant, Deorum est honos, sed pia ac recta volun- 
tate venerantium" Grotius, in making this quotation, re- 
minds us that Scripture itself in treating of the death of 
Christ makes mention now of His love and again of His obe- 
dience. It is not the sacrifice as such, the res sola, which 
avails: its virtue is dependent on something in the offerer. 
But while this is not to be questioned — in other words, while 
the moral conditions under which sacrifice had its value are, 
of course, to be allowed for — the main matter remains. All 
sacrifice was sacrifice offered to God, and, whatever its value, 
it had that value for Him. No man ever thought of offering 
sacrifice for the sake of a moral effect it was to produce on 
himself. If we say that the death of Christ was an atoning 
sacrifice, then the atonement must be an objective atonement. 
It is to God it is offered, and it is to God it makes a difference. 
Whatever objections may present themselves to it on reflec- 
tion, this point of view was universal in the ancient Church. 
The death of Christ was an atoning sacrifice through which 
sin was annulled and God and man reconciled. The most 
radical objection, of course, is that Christ is God's gift to 
man, and therefore cannot be a sacrifice offered by or for 

[30] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

men to God; but, in point of fact, this objection never had 
weight. The sense that Christ is the Father's gift to the 
world never deterred Christians from thinking of Him in- 
stinctively as a sacrifice to God for the putting away of sin. 
They accepted both ideas fully, and were never arrested by 
the sense of any antagonism between them. 

The other conception of Christ's death, which is equally 
universal in primitive times, is the conception of it as a ran- 
som. Whatever be the power which holds him, man is held 
in bondage somehow : it may be bondage to sin, or to death, 
or to demons, or to the devil, but he is indubitably a slave. 
The result of Christ's work, and especially of His Passion 
and death, is that man is set free, and he realises, as he looks 
at the cross, what his emancipation has cost. It has cost 
the death of the Son of God, who on the cross gave Himself 
a ransom for him. The truth of this, in the appeal it makes 
to our feeling and experience, is unquestionable, and it is 
as easy to apprehend as everything involving the notion 
of sacrifice is difficult. But when the primitive Christian 
mind, in dealing with this idea of ransom, passes from the 
domain of feeling into that of speculation, it becomes in- 
volved in conceptions which are curiously impossible for us. 
When the question is asked, By whom or by what is man en- 
slaved*? the answer ordinarily given is that he is enslaved by 
Satan, through his sin. By his sin, man has given Satan a just 
hold upon him. The Enemy has rights in him. The sinner 
is justly enslaved, and justice must be recognised in the 
process by which he is set free. This requirement is met in 
the death of Jesus. Here is the ransom which is paid to 
Satan, and which makes the liberation of man a just act. We 
have been bought with this great price into Christian' free- 
dom, and are not in bondage to sin or Satan any more. 

[30 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

The mythological expansion of these ideas has often been 
exhibited and derided. When it was pointed out that Satan, 
after all, did not get keeping Christ, and that therefore the 
ransom was not really but only apparently paid, the theory 
was expanded so as to include a deception of Satan, and the 
justification of that deception. Perhaps the fullest illustra- 
tion of this is given in such as passage as cc. xxiv.-xxvi. of 
the Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa. It is frankly 
admitted, in a figure found also in Gregory the Great {Mor. 
xxxiii. 7) and John of Damascus {de Fid. Orthod. iii. 27), 
that the Devil, taken in by the bait of Christ's humanity, 
was caught on the hook of His divinity which lay hidden 
beneath it. It was a case of the biter bitten. But Gregory 
of Nyssa argues that the justice of God was shown in this, 
that the enemy who had deceived man was in turn himself 
deceived. And further, he urges that the deception had also 
in view the ultimate good of Satan. The divine cannot 
come into contact with evil without prevailing against it, 
and Christ both liberates man from wickedness and heals 
the inventor of wickedness himself (Or. Catech. xxvi. ad 
fin.). This to our minds has lost contact with reality alto- 
gether, yet it was in contact with reality when it started. It is 
true to experience to say that man's emancipation from evil 
has cost Christ dear. It is true to the most elementary forms 
of Christian experience to say that He gave Himself a ran- 
som for us. It is also true to say that He had to do it. In 
the work of man's deliverance from sin and reconciliation to 
God, we are in contact with moral necessities which cannot 
be ignored and which make the task of our deliverer costly 
and severe. The sense of this was universal in the Church, and 
though the mythological form in which it often found expres- 
sion is grotesque and incredible — how could the demands of 

[32] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

righteousness be satisfied by a frauds — it is nevertheless a 
witness to an ineradicable Christian feeling which can never 
be ignored. We were not bought for nothing, we were bought 
with a price. Our redemption was conditioned by the recog- 
nition of moral necessities which had to be recognised, and 
the recognition of which involved the death of Jesus on the 
cross. 

We may say of ransom, as has been said of sacrifice, that 
it has its meaning and value in relation to God. The ransom 
is not paid to us. Its virtue does not lie in what we think 
about it. It has infinite worth in itself and to God, and if 
it has any significance which we can call atoning, it must be 
that of an objective atonement. It is important to realise 
that this is involved in both the ideas which were universally 
employed in the early Church to interpret the death of Jesus. 
Both of them imply that Christ did with God for men some- 
thing which they could not do for themselves, and which 
made them infinitely His debtors. 

In the thought as in the life of the ancient Church it soon 
became possible to distinguish characteristic tendencies in 
the East and the West. Perhaps they have sometimes been 
too broadly distinguished, and the fact that from the close 
of the second century all Christian teachers had practically 
the same New Testament in their hands, and regarded it 
with the same reverence as an inspired authority, in many 
respects assimilated their language even when the funda- 
mental tendencies of their thought were by no means the 
same. Writers of the school of Ritschl — Harnack, for 
example, in his Dogmengeschichte — emphasise the specula- 
tive character of Greek Christology and soteriology. It is a 
Logos Christology, determined fundamentally by the idea 
that the eternal Logos takes human nature into union with 

[33] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Himself in the womb of the Virgin, and by doing so achieves 
the redemption of the race. In Christ's person humanity 
is actually redeemed and made one with the divine. The 
logic of this conception would entitle us to say that the in- 
carnation — not in an ethical sense, as including the whole 
manifestation of the divine in the human throughout the 
life and death of Jesus, but in a physical or sacramental 
sense — was everything, and that the work of man's salva- 
tion was accomplished when the Word assumed flesh. It is 
this logic which historians like Harnack tend to stress, per- 
haps unduly, though no one with any considerable acquaint- 
ance with the literature will question that the Logos Christol- 
ogy does carry into Christian thinking the taint of the Logos 
philosophy — a comparative indifference to fact and to his- 
tory, a tendency to assume that the eternal truth of Christian- 
ity remains in our hands, with an a priori certainty as it were, 
though we have never been or have ceased to be interested in 
the story of Jesus. So far the reading of the Greek theolo- 
gians by Ritschl and Harnack is justified. On the other hand, 
it must be remembered that people who read the New Testa- 
ment every day and regarded it as divine, could not easily 
cease to be interested in the story of Jesus. It may have 
been inconsistent, but happily there is nothing of which the 
human mind is more capable than inconsistency. A recent 
historian of our subject, M. Riviere, distinguishes in the Greek 
fathers, besides the speculative strain criticised by Ritschl 
and his disciples, what he calls a realistic line of thought on 
the atonement. As typical of the speculative he takes Ire- 
naeus, and of the realistic Origen. The choice is surprising, 
for if there is any father in whom the speculative genius of 
Greece is incarnate it is Origen; Irenaeus, in spite of his 
daring idea of a recapitulatio of all things in Christ, is by 

[34] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

comparison a sober and pedestrian mind. It seems fairer to 
say that what M. Riviere describes as realistic ought rather 
to be called Biblical, and that the extent to which it prevails 
depends upon the extent to which a theologian was pre- 
occupied with the Bible. A man who wrote commentaries, 
like Origen, no matter how speculative his bent was, would 
inevitably use Scripture language and speech with Scripture 
ideas more than a mere writer of philosophical theology. 
The same holds still more strongly of a preacher like Chry- 
sostom. The question remains, however, as to the relation 
between the Scripture language or the Scripture ideas such 
writers employ and the general trend of their thoughts. It 
is not easy to avoid the impression that as far as their 
minds had unity — as far as they really aimed at self-con- 
sistency — the Greek fathers were as a whole under the ban 
of their Logos philosophy. That was the vital thing for 
them when their minds moved spontaneously; the Biblical 
or realistic element in their thinking does not represent any- 
thing as spontaneous or vital. It was not a realistic strain 
balancing the speculative one; it was incidental and casual; 
it came up when they had their Bibles in their hands, or in 
their memories, but it had not the native root in their minds 
which the other had; it was not properly adjusted to the 
other, and it never had the determining influence over it 
which in a historical religion was its due. The speculative 
strain, in short, belongs to the structure or constitution of 
their minds, which is by comparison constant; the realistic 
strain, to the content of their minds, which is by comparison 
inconstant; and, taking Greek Christian thought on recon- 
ciliation as a whole, it is unquestionably the former which 
preponderates. 

To illustrate this, it will be sufficient to give an account 

[35] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

of one typical work, the well-known treatise of Athanasius 
on the Incarnation of the Word. The very designation of 
the treatise, which is taken from its first chapter — Td irepl rijs 
kvavdpooTrrjaeus tov \6yov duiyrjcrufieda implies the specu- 
lative point of view and its centrality. The writer does not 
start from any ethical experience which he owes to Christ, 
or from any incident in the life of Christ — though, as we 
shall see, references to these, at subsequent stages of his 
argument, are not wanting — but from a dogmatic concep- 
tion of Christ's person of a highly speculative character. 
This is confirmed by the appeal which he makes at c. 41 
to the Greek philosophers who laughed at the idea of incar- 
nation. It is inconsistent, he argues, for men who admit 
that the Logos pervades the whole universe to question that 
it can unite itself to man. "The philosophers of the Greeks 
say that the universe is a great body; and rightly so. For 
we see it and its parts as objects of our senses. If, then, 
the Word of God is in the universe, which is a body, and 
has united Himself with the whole and with all its parts, 
what is there surprising or absurd if we say that He has 
united Himself with men also?" * The very fact that this 
appeal is made, and that an analogy is assumed between the 
presence of the Word in the universe and the incarnation of 
God in Christ, shows how speculatively Athanasius thought 
of the incarnation. If we keep our minds closer to the facts, 
what we really mean by the incarnation is that the life which 
Jesus lived in the flesh — that moral and spiritual life in the 
concrete fulness and wealth which the evangelists display — 
was divine; whether there is any analogy between the pre- 
sence of God in it and that presence of God in the universe 

1 Translation from A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 
Second Series, vol. iv. p. 58 (Oxford, 1892). 

. [36] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

which is recognised by philosophy in the fact that the reign 
of law is co-extensive with the world, is a matter about which 
most Christians do not think, and about which few of those 
who do think would agree with Athanasius. Nevertheless, 
this speculative conception of the incarnation is the deter- 
mining principle of all Athanasius' systematic Christian 
thinking. It is uppermost in his mind, and it depresses and 
thrusts into the background much that to men free from 
this speculative obsession must seem far more important. 
The incarnation means for him that the eternal Word as- 
sumed flesh in the womb of the Virgin; in doing so, He 
united the human nature to the divine; and in principle the 
atonement, or the reconciliation of humanity to God, was 
accomplished. As it has been expressed by more modern 
writers, the incarnation is the atonement or the reconcilia- 
tion. "Since man alone (43. 3) of the creatures had de- 
parted from the order of his creation, it was man's nature 
that the Word united to Himself, thus repairing the breach 
between the creature and the Creator at the very point where 
it had occurred." * Repairing the breach, it must be added, 
by an incarnation which is consummated when the human 
nature is united to the divine in the miraculous conception — 
an incarnation which, whatever its motive on the part of the 
Word, can only be called metaphysical rather than moral. 

Now, be the speculative fascination as great as it may, 
this is not a position in which a Christian mind can rest 
content. We know that we are not reconciled to God in 
the assumption of flesh by the Word in the Virgin's womb, 
but by the man Christ Jesus. We must get something at 
least of what is meant by the name of Jesus into this specu- 
lative incarnation if it is to have any value for us at all. 

1 Robertson in Select Library, ut supra, p. 32. 

[37] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

We must get this quasi-philosophical dogma charged with 
history, the history unfolded to us by the evangelists, if it 
is to hold any place in our minds. It may be that the more 
the history counts with us, the less interest we shall have in 
the dogma; but the history — in other words, that which 
we know of Jesus, and through which His reconciling power 
is exerted upon us — is the one thing we cannot do without. 
Dominated though he was by his speculative conception of 
the incarnation, Athanasius himself was conscious of this, 
and the great interest of his treatise to a modern reader is 
to see how much he has to make room for which has no 
essential relation to his principle. 

At the very beginning he makes it plain that the incarna- 
tion of the Word has an ethical motive. It did not take 
place in the order of nature (<j>vaeoos aicoXovBiq.), but in ac- 
cordance with the <j>L\av6pwTrLa and ayaBoTtis of His Father, 
and for our salvation (1. 3). But though it is ethical in 
motive, it is not specifically ethical in aim or result. Athan- 
asius does no doubt at a later stage point to the triumphant 
history of Christianity in the moral world as illustrating the 
power of Christ and proving that He was the Son of God, 
the incarnate Word; the overthrow of idolatry, the reign 
of peace, the birth of continence, the scorn of death in His 
followers, all prove that Christ is what the Church declares 
Him to be. But this does not give the incarnation an inner 
relation to these things from the first; we do not see how 
it has produced them, nor is there any indication given that 
it was adapted or intended to produce them. The one thing 
which bulks in the mind of Athanasius from first to last is not 
the sin of man, nor the estrangement between man and God, 
nor the need of effecting a change in man's relation to God 
in the sphere of conscience, but the fact that man's sin made 

[38] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

him liable to death, and that therefore to abolish death must 
be the supreme achievement of the Saviour. God had at- 
tached to sin the penalty of death, and He was bound to 
keep His word. But if He merely kept His word, then man, 
the creature He had made in His own image, would perish 
for ever: a conclusion not to be contemplated, because un- 
becoming and unworthy of the goodness of God (6. 10). 
Here was a difficulty God could not get over by a mere fiat : 
He could not simply take back His word, and annul the con- 
nection between death and sin. The liability to death was 
now inherent in human nature, and had to be dealt with in 
another way. Athanasius never wearies of expounding the 
way; he apologises for saying the same things so often, even 
about the same (20. 3). The opening sections of c. 9 are 
typical. "The Word, perceiving that no otherwise could the 
corruption of men be undone save by death as a necessary 
condition, while it was impossible for the Word to suffer 
death, being immortal and Son of the Father; to this end 
He takes to Himself a body capable of death, that it by par- 
taking of the Word who is above all might be worthy (kavov) 
to die in the stead of all, and might, because of the Word 
which was come to dwell in it, remain incorruptible, and that 
thenceforth corruption might be stayed from all by the grace 
of the resurrection. Whence, by offering unto death the 
body He Himself had taken, as an offering and sacrifice free 
from any stain> straightway He put away death from all His 
peers by the offering of an equivalent." * Although the terms 
"offering and sacrifice" naturally suggest to a New Testa- 
ment reader some reference to sin, there is no express or in- 
terpreted reference of this kind in the treatise of Athanasius. 

1 Translation from A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ut 
supra, p. 40 f. 

[39] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

The "corruption" mentioned in this passage is purely physi- 
cal: it is 00opa as opposed to a&apvia, mortality as opposed 
to immortal life. This is conspicuous in what immediately 
follows. "And thus He, the incorruptible Son of God, being 
conjoined with all by a like nature, naturally clothed all with 
incorruption, by the promise of the resurrection. For the 
actual corruption in death has no longer holding ground 
against man, by reason of the Word, which by His own body 
has come to dwell among them." The fruit of the cross, 
he tells us emphatically at the close (56. 3), is resurrection 
and incorruption, and this is bestowed on men when the 
Nord returns in His glory. 

In spite, however, of the concentration of thought on the 
incarnation, as the necessary preliminary to the abolition 
of death — in spite of the familiar formula avrbs yap hrjv- 
dp&irriaev Iva niseis Qn-Koi'r\Qu\i&> , where the "deification" of 
man means no more than "that he is made incorruptible 
and immortal (54. 3) — room has to be made, consciously or 
unconsciously, under the pressure of the New Testament, for 
ideas more capable of verification in spiritual experience. 
The sense of this is curiously betrayed by Athanasius himself. 
As far as his conception of the incarnation is concerned, there 
is no reason in the nature of the case why the incarnate Word 
should not have died the moment He came to be. Athanasius 
has actually to find a reason why He did not do so. "He did 
not immediately upon His coming accomplish His sacrifice 
on behalf of all, by offering His body to death and raising 
it again, for by this means He would have made Himself 
invisible" (16. 4). On the theory of Athanasius, there was 
no reason why He should not have made Himself invisible 
in this way; but if He had done so, there would have been 
no man Christ Jesus, no gospel story, and no Christian relig- 

[40] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

ion. What this curious question — Why did not the Logos 
die when He became incarnate? — ought to have suggested to 
Athanasius, was that in his conception of the incarnation 
there was something radically unreal. Apart from the whole 
life depicted in the gospels there is no incarnation at all; the 
assumption of flesh by the Word is a phrase. What has 
value to God and reconciling power with man is not the 
incarnation conceived as the taking up of human nature 
into union with the divine; it is the personality of Jesus, 
fashioned, as every personality is fashioned, through the 
temptations and conflicts, the fidelities and sacrifices of life 
and death; the self which is offered to God as a ransom is 
the self which has acquired in these human experiences its 
being, its value, and its power; apart from these experiences 
and what He earned and achieved in them Jesus is nothing 
to us and has nothing to offer to God. But the speculative 
conception of the incarnation had become so organic to 
Greek theology that Athanasius could not transcend it, and 
when he made room beside it for things which Christianity 
could not do without it was inevitably in a somewhat casual 
way. 

Sometimes a promising ray of light from the moral world 
breaks into his metaphysics, yet is not able to assert itself 
sufficiently. An interesting illustration occurs in 10. 5. Ath- 
anasius is referring to the fact that for the Christian death has 
lost its old character; it no longer has the curse in it of the 
primal sentence on sin (Gen. iii.). He knows as well as 
every Christian that the heart of Christianity is here. 1 But 
he never comes to deal expressly with the question how the 

1 Cf. 9. 4. "Our next step would be to narrate the end of his bodily life 
and conversation, and to tell also the nature of his bodily death ( oiroTos 
ytyovev 6 tov aduaros ddvarot) ; especially because this is the sum of our faith 
(rd K€<pd\aiou tt?» irlffTem vnuv), and all men are full of it." 

[41] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

character of death has been changed; or, in other words, 
how Christ has so dealt with sin — to which death owes its 
dreadful character — as that men may die reconciled to God, 
instead of dying under a curse. The formal references to 
the cross as curse in 25. 1. 2 do not supply the blank. When 
we come upon an expression like 1) avTodiKauxrwrj kcu 6 

\vrpovfX€VOs ras iravTW djuaprias (4°* ^), Our hopes are 

raised only to be dashed. When Athanasius recapitulates 
or summarises, as he is so fond of doing, sin and reconcilia- 
tion fade from view. The moral world as good as vanishes, 
and we are left with nothing but physical categories, like 
corruption and incorruption, to interpret the work of Christ. 
"Now that the common Saviour of all has died on our behalf, 
we, the faithful in Christ, no longer die the death as before, 
agreeably to the warning of the law; for this condemnation 
has ceased ; but" — here comes in his interpretation of words 
which surely demand a more ethical rendering — "corruption 
ceasing and being put away by the grace of the resurrection, 
henceforth we are only dissolved, agreeably to our bodies' 
mortal nature, at the time God has fixed for each, that we 
may be able to gain a better resurrection" (21.1). It is not 
too much to say that the metaphysical incarnation which 
was the vital centre of Athanasius' thought — his sacramental 
union of the divine and the human in the incarnate Word — 
had dulled his sense of an ethical union and communion 
of man with God, and of the powers by which such a union 
and communion can be impaired and destroyed, or restored 
and perfected. 1 The same holds of Greek theology generally, 
and of the type of piety akin to it. It is too much out of 

*It is significant that he only mentions the forgiveness of sins once, and 
then only in connection with Christ's work as seeking and saving the lost 
during His life on earth (14. 2). 

[42] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

relation to the world in which moral creatures, conscious of 
their estrangement from God, and needing and longing for 
reconciliation to Him, live and move and have their being. 
It asks and answers questions which are not theirs, and their 
questions it is apt to disregard. Though it is the theology 
of men who had the New Testament in their hands, and who 
could not but speak to a large extent in its language, it is 
at the same time the theology of men whose philosophy of 
the incarnation rendered them at times almost incredibly 
insensible to the facts of the life of Jesus, and to the way in 
which His death told on the sinful as a reconciling power. 
Possibly it is true that in modern theology Christ's victory 
over death has been too much overlooked. This corruptible 
must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on im- 
mortality: so St. Paul teaches, and so Athanasius may re- 
mind us. But the victory over death is conditioned by the 
victory over sin, and of this, unfortunately, Athanasius has 
little i to say. The death of Christ makes us awirevBb- 

vovs Kai k\evdepovs rijs apxcuas irapafiaaecos (20. 2)1 It 
delivers us from the death in which Adam's sin involved 
mankind — that is all. And the benefit of this also comes to 
us in ways which are hardly ways of the ethical world — the 
ways of orthodox doctrine and of sacramental grace. It is 
true that Athanasius once uses the expression ot kv Xp«rr£ 
iruTToi (21. 1) ; but no one would say that faith (t'wtis) was 
in him, as in St. Paul for example, the element of all Chris- 
tian experience. Experience, in short, has contributed too 
little to the doctrine of Athanasius on what Christ does for 
men; it has not sufficiently either inspired or controlled his 
thoughts ; and great as are the patristic names which represent 
the same type of teaching from Irenaeus and Origen, through 
Athanasius and the Gregories, to Cyril of Alexandria and 

[43] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

John of Damascus, it is not here we can hope to find the true 
key to the doctrine of reconciliation. 1 

That there is a broad contrast between Greek and Latin, 
or more generally between Eastern and Western Christianity, 
is a familiar fact, and the general character of the contrast 
is also familiar. It has been put in a variety of ways which 
all mean the same thing. Western Christianity has been 
described as more realistic, more Biblical, more practical, 
more ecclesiastical, less speculative than Eastern. Its theol- 
ogy is less metaphysical and more psychological. In one 
word, it is more experimental. Nothing gives a better idea 
of the difference than to consider that in all the literature 
of the Greek Church there is no book which offers even a 
remote resemblance to Augustine's Confessions. Now recon- 
ciliation is pre-eminently a subject to be treated on the basis 
of experience. What it means and how it is accomplished 
can be known only to the reconciled, and we naturally ex- 
pect the most vital contributions to the doctrine from men 
whose Christian personality and experience enters freely into 
their writings. It is in the world of ethics, not of meta- 
physics, that the real problems are raised; and even if, for 
this very reason, there is a greater possibility of fatal errors 
emerging, there is a greater hope of fundamental truths being 
reached. 

Augustine's is undoubtedly the greatest name m the West, 
but it is impossible to ignore Tertullian, to whom Latin Chris- 
tianity owes more, both of its ideas and its vocabulary, than 
to any other. Tertullian's interests were intensely practical, 
nnd his writings give us a more vivid idea than any others 

1 A very high estimate of the work of Athanasius, and a readiness to find 
in him both greater nearness to the New Testament and greater nearness to 
modern theology, may be seen in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werkf ii. 
131 ff.; and also in Moberly's Atonement and Personality, 349 ff. 

[44] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

which survive, of what Christianity meant in the everyday 
life of men in his time. He was supremely interested in it 
as a law and a discipline, and he was especially concerned 
with the method in which that discipline was to be exercised 
so as to secure for it its proper place and power in the lives 
of the Church's adherents. He was a lawyer, and it was 
natural for him not only to make large use of the vocabulary 
of his profession — which he could do in the way of allusion 
or illustration — but to be largely influenced by its ruling 
categories. It is more owing to him than to any one that 
the relations of God and man came to be regarded as legal 
relations, and sin, for example, as a kind of legal liability, 
which might be dealt with in ways analogous to those with 
which his profession had made him familiar. This may be 
an inadequate way of conceiving sin, but it has the advan- 
tage of being definite and specific. The problem sin presents 
is not one which can be escaped by a flight into metaphysics 
or mysticism; it is much more intractable than the kind of 
problem faced by Athanasius in the De Incarnatione Verbi, 
and it demands a more palpable answer. 

In meeting the docetic opinions of Marcion, Tertullian puts 
Christ's death with decisive emphasis into its true place. If 
Marcion was right, he says, "God's entire work is subverted. 
Christ's death, wherein lies the whole weight and fruit of 
the Christian name, is denied, though the apostle asserts it 
so expressly as undoubtedly real, making it the very foun- 
dation of the gospel, of our salvation, and of his own preach- 
ing." 1 In spite of this, however, Tertullian has no full inter* 
pretation of the death of Christ. The grace of God cornea 
to man in or through it, but he does not directly explain how v 
Even in connection with baptism, in which all the previous 

1 Adv. Marcionem, iii. 8. 

[45] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

sins of the baptized are cancelled, he does not lay stress on 
grace, but on the penitence by which the bestowal of grace 
is conditioned. The forgiveness of sins, in fact, is bought 
from the very beginning by a penitence which sincerely re- 
nounces the past, and as sincerely accepts the life of renuncia- 
tions to which Christianity calls. 1 

But it is in connection with what is known as the second 
repentance — which for Tertullian is the last — that is, in 
connection with the reconciliation to the Church of those 
who have fallen into certain kinds of sin after baptism, that 
Tertullian develops ideas which came to have great influence 
on the Western theology of reconciliation. In the recon- 
ciliation of such penitents to the Church, and their restora- 
tion to fellowship with the body of Christ, we have to deal 
with an experience in the moral world, and with what it 
was every one's concern should be a profound, passionate, 
and determining experience; and the interest of this is that 
the penitential system of the Church, as it was conceived 
thus early by Tertullian, yielded the categories which were 
afterwards applied to interpret the reconciling work of Christ. 
All the elements in the later Roman Catholic sacrament of 
penance can clearly be distinguished in Tertullian; contri- 
tion, confession — it is of course public confession, and on 
this he lays immense stress 2 — and satisfaction. For the 
future, the last is the most significant. Satisfaction, in the 
strictly legal sense of the term, is identical with punishment. 

x De Paenitentia, vi. : "Hoc enim pretio Dominus veniam addicere instituit, 
hac paenitentiae compensatione redimendam proponit impunitatem." 

3 De Paenitentia, x. f . : "Most men either shun this work, as being a public 
exposure of themselves, or else defer it from day to day. . . . They dread 
likewise the bodily inconveniences they must suffer: in that unwashen, sor- 
didly attired, estranged from gladness, they must spend their time in the 
roughness of sackcloth, and in the horridness of ashes, and the sunkenness 
of face caused by fasting." 

[46] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

The man who has broken a law makes satisfaction by endur- 
ing the penalty which is attached by the law to his offence. 
But the "satisfaction" which is made by a Christian when 
after post-baptismal sin he is reconciled to the Church is 
not the acceptance of his sin's penalty. Even if the sorrow 
and tears of the Church which accompany his own are added 
to it, they do not raise it to this height. At the most the 
satisfaction is quasi-penal: it is something which is taken 
by God as a ground for annulling the real penalty: in Ter- 
tullian's own words, the penitent sinner, who makes satis- 
faction for his sin, "temporali afflict atione aeterna supplicia 
non dicam frustratur sed expungit" 1 The important point 
is that in order to be forgiven sin had to be taken seriously 
both by the sinner and by all who wished to help him and 
to whom he was to be reconciled, and that the seriousness 
of forgiveness was condensed into the term satisfaction. 

This term is not applied in Tertullian to the work of Christ 
in relation to sin ; 2 He is not conceived as making satis- 
faction to God, in whatever sense; to make satisfaction is 
the work of the sinner himself. But Tertullian speaks of 
the Church as sympathising with the penitent and co-operat- 
ing with him in the quest for reconciliation, and in the very 
connection in which he does so, he identifies the Church with 
Christ. "Non potest corpus de unius membri vexatione 
laetum agere; condoleat universum et ad remedium con la- 
boret, necesse est. In uno et altero ecclesia est, ecclesia vero 
Christus. Ergo cum te ad fratrum genua protendis, Chris- 
tum contrectas, Christum exoras. Aeque illi cum super te 
lacrimas agunt, Christus patitur, Christus patrem deprecatur. 

1 De Paenitentia, ix. 

'Cyprian applies the "satisfacere Deo" to Christ: v. Harnack, Dogmen- 
geschichte, i. 482, note. 

[47] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Facile impetratur semper quod Filius postulat." 1 Here the 
way is not obscurely indicated to the use which was after- 
wards so largely made of the penitential system of the Church 
and of its ruling ideas, as giving a key to the interpretation 
of the work of Christ in connection with the reconciliation 
of sinners to God. The formula was bound to come, and 
for better or worse it did come, that Christ by His death — 
in which is concentrated "the whole weight and fruit of 
the Christian name" — made satisfaction for sins. But the 
original ambiguity of satisf actio and satisfacere clung to the 
term. Some rendered it rigorously in the legal sense, and 
then to make satisfaction was the same thing as to pay the 
penalty, which in this case was eternal death. Others, in 
accordance with the facts involved in the sinner's satisfac- 
tion for his own sin, could only regard the satisfaction of 
Christ as improperly or quasi penal. It was far more ade- 
quate than anything the sinner could offer to God — it was 
adequate to satisfy God for the sin of the whole world ; but it 
was not, as the assumption just referred to would have made 
it, something to which the human satisfactions performed by 
penitents bore no analogy at all. There had to be pain or 
sacrifice in it as in all satisfactions made by men, but it was 
not precisely penal pain. It was pain by which the penal pain 
due to sin was avoided. It was pain which in a way was a 
substitute for punishment : "In quantum non peperceris tibi, 
in tantum tibi Deus, credo, parcet" (De Paen. ix.). If we 
do not find in Tertullian the Anselmic formula that every 
sin must be followed by either satisfaction or punishment, 2 
we find ideas which remarkably approximate to it. 

Few things in the history of Christian thinking are more 
extraordinary than the progeny of this ambiguous idea of 

1 De Paenitentia, x. 2 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, i. xv. 

[48] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

satisfaction. Many theologians in applying it to Christ took 
it in the strict legal sense. He made satisfaction for sin by 
enduring the penalty which was due for it to man. But this 
penalty was eternal death, or the pains of hell. Could any 
one say that Christ had endured this? Luther said so. "In 
His innocent, tender heart He was obliged to taste for us 
eternal death and damnation, and, in short, to suffer every- 
thing that a condemned sinner has merited and must suffer 
for ever." And again: "Sensit poenam infernalem" x Cal- 
vin, with all his constitutional caution, is almost equally em- 
phatic. He makes much of the Descensus ad inferos, "that 
invisible and incomprehensible judgment which He under- 
went at the bar of God; that we might know that not only 
was the body of Christ given up as the price of our redemp- 
tion, but that there was another greater and more excellent 
price — namely, that He endured in His soul the dreadful tor- 
ments of a condemned and lost man." 2 One might conceive 
a man driven to this by the logic of legal satisfaction, and 
contemplating it with awe, but there is no trace of such emo- 
tions in the statement of it by John Owen, which cannot be 
read without a shudder. "The punishment due to our sin and 
the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; which that it 
was the pains of hell, in their nature and being, in their 
weight and pressure, though not in tendence and continuance 
(it being impossible that He should be detained by death), 
who can deny and not be injurious to the justice of God, 
which will inevitably inflict those pains to eternity upon sin- 
ners?" M. Riviere 3 thinks that this terrible idea of Christ's 
satisfaction for sin originated in Protestantism, but, as we 

1 See the abundant collection of passages in Kostlin, Luther s Theologie, n. 
411 f. 
'Calvin, Institutio, 11. xvi. 10. 3 Etude Theologique, 248 f. 

[49] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

shall see later, he can illustrate it copiously from Catholic 
preachers, and it is really given in the very conception of sat- 
isfaction when the term is taken in the strictly legal sense. 

Another strange branch from the same root developed in 
the Middle Ages. The satisfaction rendered by the sinner 
came to be looked at materially, as a thing or quantum which 
was what it was and had its own value unconditionally, 
provided only it was there. It was quite possible in the 
mediaeval Church for a rich man to hire a poor man to do 
for him the satisfaction which the penitential discipline of 
the Church imposed on him for his sins — say, to recite the 
Psalter a certain number of times, or to fast a certain number 
of days. The Church naturally objected to this as immoral, 
but it was too much in keeping with a purely legal concep- 
tion of sin to be easily overcome. The very formula in which 
it was condemned — He who takes the sins of others on 
himself is not worthy to be called a Christian 1 — shows that 
this was a case in which the worst had come to be through 
the corruption of the best. For surely there is a high sense 
in which to take the sins of others on oneself is the very 
badge of the true Christian. Tertullian represents the 
Church as shedding tears with the penitents, entering with 
sympathy into the whole ethical process through which their 
sin is overcome and their reconciliation achieved — joining 
with them, in fact, in making satisfaction; and it is in this 
sympathetic entrance into the experience of the penitents, 
in this taking the sins of others on itself, that he identifies 
the Church with Christ. This is the other line, the spiritual 
as opposed to the legal or material one, on which the peni- 
tential system with its satisfactions yielded ideas for the 
interpretation of Christ's work. It was the parent not only 

J Crcraer in Studien und Kritiken, 1893. 

[50] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

of the crude and immoral redemptiones of the Middle Ages, 
when the satisfaction for sin was a thing which any one 
could render mechanically for any one else, but also of what 
many have regarded as the loftiest and most spiritual inter- 
pretation of the reconciling work of Christ, that which makes 
it with Macleod Campbell and Moberly a vicarious penitence. 
We do not need to make Tertullian responsible for either of 
these developments, or to say which can best legitimate 
itself in his thought. The real interest is that the work of 
Christ is henceforth going to be interpreted on the analogy 
of human experiences in the moral world, experiences in 
which sin and satisfaction and reconciliation may be poign- 
antly real. They may not enable us completely to interpret 
the cross, but, at all events, the light they throw on it will 
be the light by which men actually live. 

While much both of the thought and the language of 
Western Christianity is owing to Tertullian, its supreme re- 
presentative is Augustine, Augustine was a great nature, 
and what Bagehot called an experiencing nature. All that 
befell him, and especially all that he had responsibility for, 
struck deep roots into deep soil. He had a unique power 
of self-observation and of self-expression. He had lived in 
sin, and had been delivered from it, and in the estimation 
of the Catholic Church he ranks as a great saint. If any one 
can give us real help to the truth about Christian reconcilia- 
tion, it ought to be such a man. It is true that Augustine 
in his pre-Christian days had been not only a sinner but a 
philosopher, and that when he became a Christian he found 
it even harder to get rid of his philosophical bias than 
of his sensuality. The strain of Neo-platonism, not to 
speak of Manichaeism, came out in his mind to the 
very end, and, as an infra-Christian mode of thinking, it 

[51] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

sometimes curiously flawed what was otherwise pure Chris- 
tian truth. 

Sin has admittedly the double character of involving re- 
sponsibility and of bringing with it moral disablement. It 
is something we have to answer for, and it is also something 
which enslaves us and keeps us from doing what we would 
and what we ought to do. No sinner can help being con- 
scious of his sin in both modes, but in Augustine the latter 
immensely preponderated. It was not responsibility, or the 
bad conscience attending on sin, which mainly troubled him ; 
it was the bondage of the will, intensified, as he came to 
believe, into a corruption of the whole nature. It is not 
necessary for our present purpose to raise any of the ques- 
tions involved in the Pelagian controversy; but it is obvious 
that the more distressing the experience of sin, the more seri- 
ous must be the problem of redemption and reconciliation. 
Augustine was perfectly sure that he could not save himself 
from his sins; without divine help he was a lost man. But 
the point is that the divine help, if it was to bring salvation 
from sin, must come in the form of a power annulling his 
inability to good, renewing his corrupt nature, restoring 
energy and freedom for good to his will. Although it is 
fair to say that in the West as contrasted with the East, 
Christian thought deals with sin and forgiveness rather than 
with death and immortality, in Augustine it is not guilt and 
pardon that are in the foreground, but moral impotence 
and renewing grace. And grace is not an attitude or a 
disposition on the part of God to the sinner; it is infused 
grace; it is a holy divine power actually lodged in the heart 
of man and enabling him to overcome his old sins. This 
is the grace which justifies the sinful, and it justifies him 
progressively by making him more and more righteous. 

[52] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

This is in keeping with the Neo-pl atonic philosophy, in 
which good is identical with being, and evil is conceived 
negatively as the mere defect or absence of good. Man's 
moral inability can be regarded as just such a defect, which 
is made good by the coming to the sinner of the strong grace 
of God. 

But how does God's grace come to man for his salvation 4 ? 
This is by no means an idle question. The philosopher — 
who is ideally a god-intoxicated man — is apt to assume un- 
consciously that it comes directly, without any mediation. 
No philosophy has ever been more independent of history, 
or more indifferent to it, than Neo-pl atonism, and a philos- 
ophy which ignores history can, of course, have no essential 
place for Christ. As we shall see, there are traces even in 
Augustine of this radically non-Christian mental attitude, but 
in the main he gives the only Christian answer to all ques- 
tions about grace: "No man can be reconciled to God and 
come to God except through Christ." 1 "The whole Church 
holds that every man is separated from God but he who is 
reconciled to him through Christ the mediator, and that no 
one is separated from God except by the sins which cut him 
off. Hence there is no reconciliation except by remission of 
sins, and that only through the grace of the compassionate 
Saviour." 2 The great thing in salvation is no doubt renewal, 
or renovatio; but, as Augustine himself says, "renovatio in- 



'De Peccatorum Mer. et Rem., i. Ixii. : "Non alienentur parvuli a gratia 
remissionis peccatorum. Non aliter transitur ad Christum; nemo aliter potest 
Deo reconciliari et ad Deum venire nisi per Christum." 

2 Ibid., i. Ivi.: "Universa ecclesia tenet . . . omnem hominem separari a 
Deo nisi qui per mediatorem Christum reconciliatur Deo, nee separari quem- 
quam nisi peccatis intercludentibus posse. Non ergo reconciliari nisi pecca- 
torum remissione, per unam gratiam misericordissimi salvatoris, per unam 
victimam verissimi sacerdotis." 

[53] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

cipit a remissione" 1 and remission is everywhere connected 
with Christ. Though grace is the grace of God, and is ulti- 
mately indistinguishable from the presence of God in the 
heart — it is He who says to the soul, "I am thy salvation" 
— it is not for the Christian a thing of which he has either 
idea or experience apart from Christ. 

Sometimes this is recognised in Augustine with a breadth 
which admits of no definition or limitation. This is especially 
the case where reference is made to the name of Christ. Thus, 
is a well-known passage of the Confessions? speaking of the 
enthusiasm for philosophy awakened in him by reading 
Cicero's Hortensius, he says: "To the great ardour which this 
book kindled there was only one drawback, that the name 
of Christ was not there. For this name, according to Thy 
mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour, Thy Son, my tender 
heart drank in even with my mother's milk and kept hidden 
in its depths {pie biberat et alte retinebai) ; and no book, be 
it ever so learned, polished, or true, where that name was not 
found, could wholly take possession of me." There is more 
of the secret of Christ's reconciling and renewing power re- 
vealed in a sentence like this than can easily be reduced to 
a formula, but Augustine does not shrink from definite 
thoughts on the subject. His great word for the interpreta- 
tion of Christ in His saving work is Mediator. In view of the 
sin of man — his original sin, aggravated by all kinds of actual 
transgressions, and exposing him to the wrath of God — "a 
mediator was necessary, that is, a reconciler (reconciliator), 
who by the offering of a unique sacrifice, of which all the 
sacrifices of the law and the prophets were shadows, should 

1 Notebook, p. 211, foot (Gottschick). 
'Lib. iii. c. iv. 

[54] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

appease this wrath." 1 There is nothing metaphysical in this 
conception of Christ as mediator. He does not, like the 
Logos in some philosophies, mediate between God and the 
universe, or even between God and man; He mediates spe- 
cifically between God and sinners. Augustine's favourite text 
in this connection is 1 Tim. ii. 5 : "There is one God, one 
mediator also between God and man, himself man, Christ 
Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all." Augustine be- 
lieved that Christ Jesus was both God and man, but it was 
as man He did His mediating and reconciling work. 2 This is 
important, because it leaves it open to him, or rather obliges 
him, to interpret that work by human analogies. In the 
passage just quoted from the Enchiridion, Augustine has 
used the figure of a sacrifice — sacrijicium singulare, he calls 
it — which was universally current in the Church. He does it 
without explanation, as was usual; but he assumes, as was 
also usual, that the sacrifice dealt with sin for its removal, 
and so annulled the wrath of God. In another passage, 
where the power of demons is that which has to be over- 
come, he writes: "It is overcome then in His name who 
assumed man and lived without sin, that in Himself, priest 
and sacrifice, there might be made remission of sins, that is, 
through the mediator between God and men, the man Christ 
Jesus: through Him, when He had made purgation of sins, 
we are reconciled to God." 3 The uniqueness of Christ's sac- 

1 Enchiridion de Fide, Spe et Charitate, 10. 

2 Sermo ccxciii. 7: The apostle, he says, quoting Rom. ix. 5, knew Christ 
to be God, and God over all; yet when it came to the point of commending 
Him as mediator he did not call Him God, but the man Christ Jesus. "Non 
enim per hoc mediator est, quod Deus est; sed per hoc mediator, quia 
factus est homo." 

3 De Civitate Dei, x. 22. 

lS5l 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

rifice is condensed in the fact that He is at once priest and 
victim; it is this which makes His sacrifice the reality to which 
all the sacrifices of the Old Testament are but shadows. But 
it remains to be discovered how we are to attach any rational 
and ethical ideas to the designation of Christ as at the same 
time sacrifice and priest. A real clue is put into our hand in 
De Civitate Dei (x. 6), where Augustine discusses the true 
conception of sacrifice, apart (in the first instance) from any 
relation to Christ. The true sacrifice must have as its object 
man's attachment to God in a holy fellowship (ut sancti 
societate inhaereamus Deo). It must be related to the su- 
preme good, in the possession of which we may be truly 
blessed. "A man himself, who is consecrated in the name of 
God and vowed to God, in so far as he dies to the world that 
he may live to God, is a sacrifice." May we not say that it is 
in this sense that Christ is a sacrifice, and that it is because He 
leads from beginning to end the kind of life here described, 
and is able to draw sinful men into fellowship with Himself 
in it, that He is acceptable in God's sight, and that God for 
His sake puts away His wrath against the sinful, and admits 
them to His peace? When we say this, at all events, we are 
saying what we can understand. We are speaking of the man 
Christ Jesus, and of an ethical achievement of that man, 
which is intelligible to us, and not alien. We are dealing 
with something which is transacted in the moral world and 
makes a moral appeal to us. The sacrifices which Augustine 
assumes to be required from the Christian when he seeks 
reconciliation after sin, furnish an analogy by which we can 
interpret the sacrifice of Christ. "You are a sinner," he says; 
"take vengeance on yourself, descend into your conscience, 
exact the penalty from yourself, torture yourself; for thus 
you offer sacrifice." And again : "It is not enough to change 

[56] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

your manners for the better, and to give up evil deeds, unless 
satisfaction also be made to God for what has been done, 
by the pain of penitence, by the sighing of humility, by the 
sacrifice of the contrite heart and the co-operation of alms." * 
Of course Christ could not offer such sacrifice for His own 
sins, for He knew no sin; but was it impossible for Him, 
when moved by compassion for sinners, to be affected in 
relation to God and their sins in a way which such language 
may not inappropriately describe ? Augustine says expressly 
that He made our sins His own that He might make His 
righteousness ours. 2 But if He made our sins His own, must 
not His experience, and especially His emotions, in regard 
to them, have been in reality what ours ought to have been? 
He would really feel the sorrow we should have felt; He 
would really acknowledge the wrong in them all as we should 
have acknowledged it, but for deadness of conscience could 
not ; He would really submit, as our pride and fear prevented 
us from submitting, to the consequences attached to sin by 
God. Augustine does not believe that sin is ever unattended 
by such consequences. Pardon involves the acceptance of 
them, and hence he does not shrink from using words like 
punishment even in connection with Christ. "By taking on 
Him punishment (poenam) and not taking on Him guilt 
(culpam) He destroyed both guilt and punishment." 3 But 
we have to remember here what has already been said about 
interpreting Christ's reconciling work on the analogy of the 
penitential system. Though an ancient writer could derive 
poenitere from poenam tenere, it was only in an improper 

*Gottschick, 138 f. 

a Gottschick, 168. 

3 Compare Gottschick, 181 f. : "Suscepit Christus sine reatu supplicium 
nostrum, ut inde solveret reatum nostrum et finiret etiam supplicium nos- 
trum." 

[57] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

sense that the sufferings, or renunciations, or sacrifices de- 
manded from sinners under this system, by way of satisfac- 
tion, could be called penal. Strictly speaking, they were 
not punishments, but the means by which punishment was 
averted. Hence, just as Tertullian can say of the penitent 
sinner, that afflictatione temporali aeterna supplicia expungit, 
so Augustine can say of Christ, Mortem tuam aeternam occi- 
dit mors temporalis Domini" When Christ died as He did 
die on the cross, He was not punished, but He accepted the 
last consequence of sin in a spirit with which God was well 
pleased; He made a satisfaction to God — though Augustine 
does not use the term satis j 'actio to describe what He did — 
on the ground of which God can turn His anger and punish- 
ment away from all who come to be one with Christ. 

This last point is of the highest importance in Augustine. 
Christ is the head of a body which is one with Him, and it is 
His body only for which His work avails. "Non justificat 
nisi corpus suum, quod est ecclesia." 1 The Word became 
flesh, he says, that He might become head of the Church. 
Often when Christ speaks, it is ex persona ecclesiae. He suf- 
fered in the Church and the Church in Him. 2 When He 
cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me !" He 
spoke ex persona membrorum. He was completely identified 
with His members in all their interests and fortunes. But 
this identification is not metaphysical, it is ethical. It is not 
one with the assumption of flesh by the Word, it is the 
supreme achievement of the love of Christ for sinners. It 
is the ne plus ultra of love, the utmost reach of its moral 
passion. And it is by something correspondingly intense 

1 Gottschick, 1 66 f. 

'Epist. cxl. (Gaume's Ed., u. 638 a.c). 

[58] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

and ethical that we become one with Him, and share in the 
benefits of His passion. He not only unites Himself to us, 
but He unites us to Himself, and it is as we are caught up 
into this union that all the experiences of reconciliation — its 
blessings and its cost — come home to us together. In this 
connection the language of Augustine is nothing less than 
astounding. Christ and His members are one Christ, he 
writes. And a little further on, "We have been made not 
only Christians, but Christ." * Christ includes us in one body 
with Himself (concorporans nos sibi)^ making us His mem- 
bers, that in Him we also might be Christ. It is through this 
in the long run that we are reconciled and renewed. 

Augustine has apparently little interest in the question, 
that had been raised even in this time, whether this way of 
reconciling men to God was necessary. They are fools, he 
says bluntly, who declare that the wisdom of God could 
not otherwise set man free than by assuming man, being 
born of a woman, and suffering at the hands of sinners/ 
Yet this purpose of redemption was the cause of the incar- 
nation. Christ had no reason for coming into the world but 
to save sinners. 3 This is the true experimental and Biblical 
ground on which to stand. Attractive as it may appear to 
speculative minds, the idea that Christ would have come 
apart from this redemptive purpose — to complete creation, 
or give humanity a Head — departs from the line of religious 
and especially of Christian interest. It finds the motive of 
the incarnation in some speculative or metaphysical fitness, 
and not where Scripture and experience put it, in love. It 

1 In Joan. Evgm. Tractatus, xii. 8 ; xxi. 8. 
* De A gone Chrtstiano, 12 (xi.). 

s Sermo clxxv. 1: "Christi nulla fuit causa veniendi nisi peccatore9 salvo9 
facere." 

[59] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

is the supreme distinction of Augustine among the repre- 
sentatives of the ancient Church that he conceived Christ 
fundamentally as the mediator of the love of God to sinful 
men, and that when he spoke of that love he charged it with 
all the meaning that can be drawn from the gospel story. 
None of the fathers is steeped as he was in the synoptic 
gospels; none had learned so profoundly as he, from the 
whole life and passion of Jesus, what the love of God to 
sinners means. In spite of the Neo-platonic taint in his 
conception of renewing grace, when he comes to the point it 
is the love of God as exhibited in the man Christ Jesus 
which is everything to him. This is what makes him the 
most living of all the fathers. For nothing but love wins 
and reconciles. 1 

Augustine is very conscious of the difficulties involved in 
the idea that the love of the eternal God should only be 
revealed at a particular time, and especially in the idea that 
the love which came from God Himself in Christ should 
make a difference in God's attitude to men, but he simply 
states the difficulties in the most vivid form; he does not 
solve them. "Far be it from God to love any one in time 
with, as it were, a new love which was not in Him before." 2 
Yet there must be some way in which justice is done both 
to God's eternal love to men, which is the source of salvation, 
and to His wrath against sinners, which constitutes the need 
of salvation. Using the term "hatred" to express the latter, 
Augustine says that in a wondrous and divine way even when 
God hated us He loved us. He knew how, at one and the 

1 De Fide et Symbolo, 18: "Non enim reconciliaraur illi nisi per dilectionera 
qua etiam filii appellamur." 
a Gottschick, 121, note 211. 

[60] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

same time, in every one of us, both to hate what was our work 
and to love what was His own. He loved all His saints be- 
fore the foundation of the world, sicut praedestinavit\ but 
when they are converted and find Him, then they are said — 
it is only a fag on de parler — to begin to be loved by him. The 
truer truth is diligenti reconciliati sumus} He already loves 
us when we are reconciled; or, as Calvin put it afterwards, 
wrestling with the same problem, "Quia prius diligit, postea 
nos sibi reconciliati 2 It ought to be acknowledged, in spite 
of his profound sense of the corruption of human nature, that 
Augustine recognises in man the capacity for redemption. 
There is still in the sinner something which is of God and 
which is dear to God; he even uses the startling expression 
"Christ loved nothing in us but God" — or the divine. 8 It 
recalls Ritschl's definition of Christian love as the identifica- 
tion of oneself with God's interest in others, or with that 
which is of God in them, and by bringing the love of Christ 
once more within the range of a human analogy, it helps us 
to understand it more fully. 

But there is one aspect of Christ's love, or one mode of its 
manifestation, to which Augustine ascribes supreme power 
in the work of subduing sinners, winning them, and recon- 
ciling them to God — namely, His humility. This it was 
which exercised an overpowering influence upon Augustine 
himself. Nothing could show more conclusively that his 
conception of the mediator and His love comes from the 
gospel story and from it alone. We may seek in vain in the 
Epicureans and Stoics, in the Manichaeans and Platonists, 

1 Gottschick, 113. 

2 Institutio, 11. xvi. 3. 

3 In Joan. Evgm. Tractatus, lxv. 2: "Quid enim nisi Deura dilexit in 
nobis? Non quod habebamus sed ut haberemus." 

[61] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

for the one thing which is most characteristic of the gospel. 
Whatever else we find in them, we do not find humility. "Via 
humilitatis hujus aliunde manet: a Chris to venit. Haec via 
ab illo est qui cum esset altus, humilis venit." It is the sum of 
Christ's teaching. "Quid enim aliud docuit humiliendo se, 
f actus obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem cruris? Quid 
aliud docuit solvendo quod non debebat, ut nos a debito libe- 
raret? Quid aliud docuit baptizatus qui peccatum non fecit, 
crucifixus qui reatum non habebat? Quid aliud docuit nisi 
hanc humanitatem? 1 It is so great a thing to be a little one 
that unless Christ, who is so great, condescended to teach us 
we could never learn the lesson. 2 The primal sin and the root 
of all sins is pride, the desire and determination to be inde- 
pendent of God; and we cannot be reconciled to God but in 
the humility which is willing to be absolutely dependent on 
Him, and which appeals to us irresistibly in the lowly life of 
Jesus. It is impossible to exaggerate the place of such 
thoughts in the mind and heart of Augustine, and they passed 
from the gospels through him into the life of the Western 
Church as the most vital and valuable element in its piety. 
Christianity may be said to be summed up in this one word, 
hmnilitas. "Est paene una disciplina Christiana." 3 And 
again, "Doctrina Christiana, humilitatis praeceptum." This 
is the ethical side of the matter, but what is most relevant to 
the subject of these lectures is that the humility of Christ, as it 
is revealed in His life and death, is the most moving form 
in which the reconciling love of God appeals to the great soul 
of Augustine. It is his last word in the gospel of reconcilia- 
tion: "Jam humilis Deus et adhuc superbus homo?" 4 

The philosophical strain in Augustine — the strain, in other 

1 Enarratio in Psalmum, xxxi. 18. 2 De Sancta Virgimtate, 35. 

3 Sermo cccli. 4. 4 Sermo clx. 5. 

[62] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

words, which was apt to be indifferent to history, and there- 
fore eventually to the historical importance of Christ — betrays 
its survival, in spite of all that has just been said of his debt 
to the gospels, in one or two singular passages which must 
not be ignored. They are passages in which the idea of 
grace — which, when it has reconciling and renewing power, 
must be identified with the life of lowly love in which it is 
revealed — is treated as if it were independent of Christ and 
His life and death in the flesh, and related to God alone. 
Instead of being the mediator of grace, Christ stands as the 
supreme illustration or example of it. The grace by which 
Christ is good from the beginning is the same by which 
others, His members, are changed from bad to good. 1 Every 
man from the beginning of his faith is made a Christian by 
the same grace by which that man, the son of Mary, is made 
the Christ. He is not only an exemplum vitae, that by imitat- 
ing Him we may live righteously; He is also exemplum 
gratiae, that by believing on Him we may hope to owe right- 
eousness of our own to the same source to which He owed 
His. 2 The most striking form in which Augustine puts his 
view, is that which makes Christ the most illustrious example 
of predestination. In his book on the predestination of the 
saints, he says in effect, "Look at the Saviour Himself, the 
mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Will 
any one say that by antecedent merits of its own, whether 
of works or of faith, the human nature which is in Him 
acquired this position, or came to be what it is?" "Responde- 
atur quseso : ille homo, ut a Verbo Patri coaeterno in unitatem 

1 Op, imperf. contra Julianum, i. cxxxviii. and cxl. 

2 The doubtful reading in this sentence (Operis imperf. contra Julianum, 
i. cxl.) — per ipsum or per spiritum — I have omitted in translating. If per 
ipsum is read, it is an attempt to combine the experimental with the philo- 
sophical view of grace, which is at least formally inconsistent with itself. 

[63] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

personae assumptus, Filius Dei unigenitus esset, unde hoc me- 
ruit?" If this is offered as any suggestion of how men are 
saved by the grace of God — the reconciliation of sinners to 
God being brought into some kind of parallelism to the predes- 
tination of the Son of Mary to be the Christ — the true answer 
is that absolute predestination is not the explanation of any- 
thing in the moral world. The man who asserts predestina- 
tion thus, without mitigation or remorse, has cancelled the 
world of history and experience, and cannot say anything to 
the purpose whether about the Saviour or the saved. It is a 
wonderful proof of the tenacity of what is bred in the bone, 
that a man who could say what Augustine has said of the 
reconciling power of God's love as exhibited in the humility 
of Jesus should still be haunted by a conception of God and 
his salvation which really dates from his pre-Christian days 
and is completely irrelevant to the gospel. 

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Augustine may 
be found, latent or patent, all the ideas on which the Western 
Church lived for a thousand years. His own experience as 
a Christian was so profound, intense, and varied, that it 
could not soon be systematised ; there is no trace of system 
in his own self-expression, and just as little — though there 
is more formalism — in even the greatest of his successors, like 
Pope Gregory I. Hence we do not lose anything for our 
purpose if we pass directly from Augustine to Anselm, from 
the fifth century to the eleventh. Anselm, the first and 
perhaps the greatest of the scholastic theologians, made a 
truly heroic effort to present the truth of the Christian 
doctrine of reconciliation in a scientific and systematic form. 
For him, as for all Christians in his time, there was only one 
dogma, that of the incarnation of the God-man; this was 
the one truth on which the Church as a whole had declared 

[64] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

its mind. The title of his famous work, Cur Deus Homo? — 
Why did God become man? — intimates that what he is in 
quest of is the rationale of Christianity itself. If he can 
answer his question, he has rationalised the Christian religion 
and raised to the level of science the dogma which was 
accepted by faith on the authority of the Church. Anselm 
emphasises in his preface this character of his work. The 
argument that he is going to conduct, though it is all about 
Christ, does not owe anything to Christ. It is to be as con- 
vincing to Jews and pagans as to Christians, to those who 
are stating objections to the truth as to those who acknowl- 
edge the truth, to those who are seeking reasons for faith 
as to those who are seeking the reasons of faith. This is 
not attractive or convincing to the modern reader. We are 
not interested in what can be said in defence of Christianity 
remoto Chris to or quasi nihil sciatur de Chris to \ we do not 
believe that Christ and all that the Church believes about 
Him — including the contents of the gospels — can be deduced 
by a necessary process of reasoning from any premises what- 
soever, just as we do not believe that history is a subject 
for deductive reasoning at all. History is a datum, and even 
in Christ it has to be taken as it is given, not deduced. Never- 
theless, Anselm was a great Christian, and in answering the 
question Cur Deus Homo? he wrote a great book. Put 
briefly, the answer to the question is that God became man 
because only thus could sin be dealt with for man's salvation, 
and God's end in the creation of man secured. In other 
words, the rationale of the incarnation is in the atonement. 
It is through the atonement that the incarnation is seen to 
be rationally necessary and therefore credible. All Christians 
accept it as a fact, . but those who follow Anselm' s argu- 
ments, and are convinced by them, accept it also as a 

[65] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

necessity of reason. It has its place not only in faith but 
in science. 

It would be possible to give a fair account of Anselm, 
centring on two of his famous sentences : Nondum considerasti 
quanti ponderis sit peccatum (i. xxi.), and Deum non decet 
aliquid in suo regno inordinatum dimittere (i. xii.). It is 
safer, however, to follow the order of his own thoughts. 

Even in the eleventh century, Anselm met people who 
made the objections to the Christian faith which are current 
to-day. If God had to redeem men, why could He not 
redeem them sola voluntate, by the mere exercise of His 
will*? Why speak of redemption at all? Whose slaves are 
we from whom God cannot deliver us merely by putting 
forth His almighty power? If you speak of being redeemed 
from His anger, is not His anger simply His will to punish, 
and can He not change His will without more ado? Then, 
going past these preliminary yet far reaching objections, the 
atonement as it was currently presented is directly assailed. 
"Who, if he were to condemn the innocent that he might 
set free the guilty, would not himself be judged worthy of 
condemnation ?" (i. viii.). It is because he writes with these 
objections present to his mind — objections to the very idea 
of an atonement, and objections to the atonement as it was 
believed to have been in point of fact accomplished — that 
Anselm has made one of the great contributions to this 
doctrine. 

His fundamental assumption, which is often overlooked, 
ought to be put in the foreground. It is that God's end in 
the creation of man must be attained. This is an agreed 
point before the discussion opens. God created man for 
blessedness in fellowship with Himself, and therefore man 
must attain to such blessedness. If he did not, God's in- 

[66] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

tention would be finally defeated, which is for Anselm an 
impossible supposition. Here he is at one with Athanasius 
(see p. 39 supra). We might ask whether the natural and 
inevitable inference from this rational necessity, as Anselm 
calls it, is not universal salvation, but this is a question he 
does not raise. He proceeds to point out that all men by 
their sin have forfeited the blessedness of communion with 
God, and can therefore only attain to their chief end through 
the remission of sins (i. x.). Hence the question arises, 
What is sin? 

This is a question which had not before been asked with 
sufficient precision, yet it is one on the answer to which all 
ideas of the nature and necessity of atonement are dependent. 
Sin, according to Anselm, consists in the creature's with- 
holding from God the honour which is His due. "He who 
does not render to God the honour which is due to Him takes 
away from God what is His; he robs God of His honour 
(Deum exkonorat), and this is sin" (i. xi.). There has been 
much discussion of Anselm's introduction into theology of 
the honour of God. What does it really mean? It may 
be that it carries with it some flavour of ideas of personal 
rank or dignity, such as lay at the root of the feudal system. 
But this is certainly not the main thing, and it is absurd to 
say that Anselm, or those to whom his thoughts appealed, 
conceived of God as a feudal baron, and not as the Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. When Anselm speaks of sin as robbing 
God of honour, it is his way of saying that when we sin we 
wrong a person, and an infinitely great person, not merely 
a law or a principle; and it is not very bold to say that no 
conception of sin which ignores this is adequate to the truth 
about sin as it is revealed in the Christian conscience. Anselm 
himself is only too apt to conceive of sin quantitatively, as 

[67] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

if it were a thing, which could be quite well comprehended 
without any personal reference at all; but when he presents 
it as the withholding of honour from God, or as the dishonour- 
ing of God, the personal reference, which is indispensable, is 
brought into view. 

We now have man in his sin on the one hand; and on the 
other, unattainable because of sin, yet destined, as truly as 
God is God, to be attained, we have the blessedness of man 
in communion with his Maker. What is to be done? If 
God is not to suffer a final defeat, sin must be annulled or 
overcome somehow. It is the highest merit of Anselm that 
he sees it to be impossible for God to ignore sin, or to treat 
it as less real or less awful than it is. To forgive sins by a 
mere arbitrary exercise of will would be to treat sin as if it 
were not, and so to bring confusion into God's kingdom. It 
would not be the annulling of sin, but the annulling of the 
moral order through which God expresses Himself in the 
world ; go to the bottom, and it would mean not that sin had 
ceased to be sin, but that God had ceased to be God (i. xii.). 
It does not become God, as Anselm puts it, aliquid in suo 
regno inordinatum dimittere. Nothing, he says, is less to be 
endured in the moral world (in or dine rerum) than that the 
creature should take away the honour due to the Creator, 
and not pay or make good what it takes away. We can see 
now that there are present to Anselm's mind two modes or 
aspects of sin with which the atoning work of Christ has to 
do. On the one hand, we must think of it as the violation 
of a universal moral order, a violation carrying consequences 
in its train which cannot be treated as if they were not. 
On the other, we must think of it as an infringement of the 
honour due to a very great person, an honour which is defined 
by Anselm as the submission of the will of the rational 

[68] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

creature to the will of his Creator. These two ways of con- 
ceiving sin blend to some extent in Anselm's mind, and if 
we would be just to him we must remember both; but the 
form of his thoughts — it would not be as true to say their 
substance — is mainly determined by the latter. It is with 
sin as the taking away by man of the honour due to God 
that he is expressly concerned. 

Now here there are only two possibilities, and Anselm sim- 
ply announces them. God's honour must be restored, and it 
can be restored — here he argues from human analogies — 
either by satisfaction being done for the offence, or by punish- 
ment for it being endured. In the case of satisfaction the 
offender makes good his offence, in the case of punishment 
it is made good upon him by the act of the offended. 

Of these two ways of dealing with sin, punishment, it 
might be said, is the simpler, and raises no problems. If 
God punished sin He would merely make good His own 
honour upon the sinner, without the sinner's will, and the 
sinner would perish under the infliction. It is putting the 
case too strongly to say that this raises no problems; it 
raises no special problems, but it brings up the all inclusive 
problem of man's creation. Why did God create rational 
beings at all if they were to perish thus 4 ? Why did He 
begin to do something which He was not able to finish? 
According to Anselm, it is inconceivable that God's purpose 
in creating man should be finally frustrated in this fashion; 
and as this is an assumption of reason, it is rationally necessary 
that not the easy way of punishment, but the hard way of 
satisfaction, should be followed in dealing with human sin. 
Anselm is profoundly impressed with its hardness, and this 
also is to be set down to his credit. It is not enough, he 
argues, to restore what one has taken away; there is some- 

[69] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

thing (so it might seem) of insult as well as injury in depriv- 
ing God of His honour; and the sinner pro contumelia illata, 
for the contempt he has put upon God, must give back more 
than he has taken away. If we take this too pedantically, 
it may be made to introduce analogies which are quite 
foreign to the divine nature and to the relations of God and 
man; it has been interpreted to mean that God to Anselm 
was a Norman baron, and sinners creatures to be treated as 
unmannerly vassals. But there is nothing like this in the 
Cur Deus Homo. What is suggested in the passage quoted 
(i. xi.) is that in sin a person has been wantonly wronged 
as well as a law broken, and that the situation thus created 
is not one which can be formally or easily adjusted. It is 
rather one of tragic intensity. Sin creates an enormous 
liability. We ought not, Anselm argues, to commit the 
slightest sin for worlds; not to gain worlds, not even to save 
worlds from ruin, should we permit ourselves a single glance 
contrary to the will of God. Hence to make satisfaction 
for sin not even the world would be enough to offer to God ; 
no, not whole series of worlds. Something must be offered 
greater than all worlds, greater than everything which is 
less than God Himself. 

A satisfaction like this, manifestly, is out of man's power; 
he cannot render it. But it does not need to be urged that 
this satisfaction is impossible for the sinner; all satisfaction 
is equally so. Whatever good a man does or can do is already 
due to God on other grounds, and cannot be brought into ac- 
count as satisfaction for sin. If, however, satisfaction is to be 
rendered at all, it must be by a human being, one of the same 
stock with the sinner. The emphasis laid by Anselm on 
this point is not to be ignored. It may be due to a peculi- 
arity of Germanic law, according to which only the fellow 

[70] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

tribesmen of an offender were allowed to make satisfaction 
for him; the act of satisfying proceeding on the basis of a 
natural unity existing between the performer and him for 
whom the performance was done. But it may also be due — 
though Anselm is supposed to be arguing on grounds of pure 
reason, and with no debt to revelation — to the unconscious 
influence of the New Testament idea that the Saviour and 
the saved are all of one (Heb. ii. 1 1 ). At all events, Anselm is 
so convinced of its importance that he argues that it was 
necessary that the redeemer, who makes satisfaction, should 
not be a new man made out of nothing like the first, but one 
taken by a virgin birth from the original stock of humanity 
(n. vi.-viii.). He must be man that He may be entitled to 
act for the sinful race, and He must be God that He may be 
able to offer to God the immeasurable satisfaction which 
shall be equal to the necessities of the case. Hence the need 
for the incarnation or the God-man. It is the necessity of 
making satisfaction for sin, in order that men who have sinned 
may nevertheless attain the destiny of blessedness in eternal 
life with God, which explains the one dogma of the Christian 
faith— namely, the incarnation. As it has already been 
expressed, the rationale of the incarnation lies in the atone- 
ment. Were it not for the atonement, no one could say that 
the incarnation had any necessity in it which appealed to 
reason. 

This no doubt contains many Christian thoughts, but for 
the modern mind it is artificial in form. When Anselm pro- 
ceeds to ask what the satisfaction is which the God-man 
actually renders, he becomes still more artificial. The God- 
man must do something for the honour of God to which He 
is not obliged upon other grounds. The obedient fulfilment 
of God's will, as that will stands for all reasonable creatures, 

[71] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

cannot be the satisfaction; for as a reasonable creature the 
God-man is already obliged to this on His own account. But 
He is not obliged to die — for death is the wages of sin, and 
He has not sinned — and hence His death, the surrender of 
His infinitely precious life, may be offered to God by way 
of satisfaction. According to Scripture teaching, this is the 
satisfaction which He does offer — He died for our sins — and 
it is so precious that it more than countervails the sin of the 
whole world. This connection of ideas enables Anselm to say 
that the incarnation and passion of the God-man are to 
reason demonstrably necessary in order to man's forgive- 
ness and blessedness. When he comes, however, at the end 
of his treatise (n. xix.), to show how man gets the benefit of 
Christ's satisfaction for sin, he is not very happy. Christ's 
death was an immense gift, freely given to God, without any 
obligation on Christ's part to give it, and as such it is entitled 
to a reward from God. God cannot, however, give Christ 
anything, for He needs nothing, all that is the Father's being 
already His; and consequently the reward due to Christ for 
the stupendous work of supererogation in His death — a 
reward which God must bestow somewhere — comes to those 
for whose salvation the Son of God became man. The 
rational necessity seems to lapse here, and all Anselm can say 
is "Quibus convenientius fructum et retributionem suae mortis 
attribueret, quam illis propter quos salvandos (sicut ratio 
veritatis nos docuit) hominem se fecit, et quibus (ut diximus) 
moriendo exemplum moriendi propter justitiam dedit"? 
frustra quippe imitatores ejus erunt, si meriti ejus participes 
non erunt." The idea in the last clause here, in which Christ's 
death is represented as a death for righteousness, in which 
we are bound to imitate Him, is quite disparate from that 
in which it is represented as a work of supererogation to which 

[72] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

Christ was not bound, and which for that very reason can 
be offered to God as a satisfaction for man's sin. But if the 
argument fails to satisfy us at this point, it is not so with 
Anselm and his interlocutor. The saint seems to have con- 
templated his conclusion with a fair degree of complacency. 
"Nihil rationabilius, nihil dulcius, nihil desiderabilius mundus 
audire potest" 

Anselm is so important in the history of Christian thought 
on our subject, that it is worth while to state explicitly 
what seem to be the merits and demerits of his doctrine. 
By its merits are meant its points of agreement with Scripture 
and with Christian experience, and by its demerits its failure 
to do justice to these authorities. 

Its final merit is that it has a profound sense of the serious- 
ness of sin. It may no doubt be held that Anselm considers 
sin too much as the doing of dishonour to a great person, 
and too little as a corruption or perversion of nature, or as 
the violation of a universal moral order (though this last, as 
we have seen, is not excluded) ; but he is right in empha- 
sising the gravity of the act, and the desperateness of the 
situation it produces. He is right in saying that we ought 
not to commit the slightest sin for worlds, which is only 
another way of saying that even the slightest sin involves 
a responsibility for which there is no material measure. In 
his time men thought they could make satisfaction for it 
themselves, without too much trouble; they even thought 
that in some cases they could hire others to make satisfac- 
tion for them. In our time the tendency is to think satisfac- 
tion superfluous. A generation trained upon natural science * 
is apt to extenuate sin, to ascribe it to heredity, to environ- 
ment, to irresistible natural impulses which will be outgrown 
and had best be forgotten ; it is not thought of in any serious 

[73] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

way as creating a responsibility which must be faced as all 
it is before the weight of it can be lifted from the conscience. 
As against all such dispositions the New Testament and the 
Christian conscience support Anselm when he says : "Nondum 
considerasti quanti ponderis sit peccatum." 

It is a further merit of Anselm that he shows a strong 
sense that the necessity for satisfaction — whatever be said 
of the nature of it — lies in God Himself. It is a divine de- 
mand which is satisfied by it : it does not become God aliquid 
in suo regno inordinatum dimittere. It is a divine interest 
which is safe-guarded by it, the honour of God. Anselm may 
conceivably have been quite wrong in his idea of what the 
divine demand in the case of sin is, or as to what is required 
to do justice to it; but he is not wrong in thinking that 
where sin is in question the supreme interests at stake are 
divine, and that it is God to whom all dealings with it must 
have reference. 

Finally, it is a merit of Anselm that he treats the forgive- 
ness of sins as the result of Christ's redemptive work. Even 
in Augustine we found indications of a grace of God — a 
redeeming grace — of which Christ is rather the most illus- 
trious example than the only source or channel. There is 
nothing of this in Anselm. As far as sinners are concerned, 
God's grace and Christ's work are for him the same thing. 
It will hardly be questioned that in this he is truer to 
the New Testament point of view as well as to common 
Christian experience. 

The demerits of Anselm's theory are as obvious and in 
some ways as important as its merits. Partly they lie in 
inner imperfections and inconsistencies, partly in failure to 
embrace particular aspects of the truth as they are reflected 
in the New Testament and in Christian experience. Perhaps 

[74] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

the most conspicuous is that Anselm gives no prominence 
to the love of God as the source of the satisfaction for sin, 
or to the appeal which that love makes to the heart of sinful 
men. Starting as he does with the abstract proposition that 
God's end in creating man must be attained, he almost suc- 
ceeds, no doubt involuntarily, in banishing from his dialectical 
deduction of the truth the motive of love either on one 
side or the other. It is not by the spontaneous grace of God ; 
it is not by a free movement of mercy, the wonderfulness 
of which comes upon us again and again; it is not by the 
love which shines into our hearts as we look at the "friend 
of sinners" in the pages of the gospels, that the satisfaction for 
sin is explained ; it is deduced by what Anselm calls a rational 
necessity, and belongs to the world of metaphysics, not of 
spiritual experience. This is what comes of constructing 
arguments about Christianity remoto Christo, arguments 
which will appeal equally to Jews and pagans as to Christians. 

A kindred demerit of Anselm is that in the Cur Deus Homo 
the death of Christ is treated merely as a thing, a quantum of 
some kind. It is not interpreted in connection with His 
life; in fact the possibility of so interpreting it is almost 
explicitly denied. The relation of the life and of the death 
to God is quite different. Christ owed God His life, just such 
as we know it to have been, but He did not in the same sense 
owe Him His death. His death is something valuable, we 
can hardly tell why; He has no definite use for it, and there- 
fore He can freely offer it to God as a satisfaction for the 
sins of men; but it is not filled with the moral value of 
love to man or obedience to the Father's will. Ex hypothesi 
it is outside of the world of moral obligation, and is therefore 
not susceptible of moral construction. 

It is in some respects another way of putting ne same 

[75] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

truth if we say that no real connection is established by 
Anselm between the death of Christ and the sin of the world, 
which sin, nevertheless, can only be remitted on the ground 
of that death. This is due to the entire arbitrariness of the 
idea of satisfaction. It seems fairly certain that the word 
satis {actio — though commonly enough applied, in connection 
with the penitential system of the Church, to the acts or 
sacrifices by which the Christian who had fallen into sin 
made good his fault, and was reconciled to God and His 
people — was never before Anselm expressly applied to the 
work of Christ. This gave plausibility to the attempt of 
Cremer to derive the idea in Anselm — and especially to derive 
the idea that satis f 'actio and poena were alternatives which 
excluded each other — not from the penitential system, but 
from a peculiarity in German tribal law. 1 Here the satis- 
faction was not the punishment, nor anything akin to it, 
but the Wehrgelt or payment, by which liability was covered 
and punishment averted. But though this provided an 
easy explanation of some degenerations of "satisfaction" in 
the mediaeval Church, 2 it has hardly succeeded in standing 
criticism. The idea of satisfaction in Anselm has too much 
that is analogous to it in the penitential system, and ideas 
analogous to his are too widely diffused in quarters not 
open to Germanic influence, for Cremer's suggestion to hold. 
From the very beginning, as we have seen in connection with 
Tertullian, a kind of ambiguity attached to the term satis- 
faction, even when the satisfaction was rendered by men. 
In law, satisfaction was penal; it was rendered to the law 

1 Cremer, Studien und Kritiken, 1880 (pp. 71".), "Die Wurzeln des Anselm- 
ischen S atisfaktionsbe griff es"; and 1893 (pp. 316 f.), "Der germanische Satis- 
faktionsbegriff in der Versohnungslehre" 

* See what is said above of the redemptiones on p. 50. 

[76] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

by paying its penalty. In the discipline of the Church it 
was not strictly speaking penal; it was a means of averting 
the penalty. But it was painful, it was due to sin, and 
in that sense it was quasi-penal. Anselm, by denning Christ's 
death merely as an alternative to the punishment of sin 
{necesse est ut omne peccatum satis] "actio aut poena sequa- 
tur), and by refusing to define it in relation to His life, as 
something which He owed to God, and which therefore en- 
tered into His vocation and could be morally understood, has 
practically made it meaningless. When the Bible says Christ 
died for sins, it assumes a real connection of death and sin 
which makes the proposition intelligible; but though Anselm 
would not have questioned such a connection, he does not have 
it in his mind when he speaks of Christ offering His death to 
God as a satisfaction for men's sins. The absence at this 
point of a link in the chain of Anselm's "rational necessities" 
is one of the worst flaws in his argument. 

To conclude the estimate of his demerits, Anselm gives no 
clear account of the way in which the work of Christ comes 
to benefit men. Christ is left standing, so to speak, with 
the merit of His death in His hand, and looking round to 
see what He can do with it. What is more suitable or becom- 
ing (convenientius) than that He should give it to those who 
in virtue of the incarnation are His kindred*? Nothing could 
be less like than this to all we know about how the work of 
Christ takes effect in human lives. In not tracing "satis- 
faction" originally to the love of God, in not exhibiting it as 
an integral element in the life of the man Christ Jesus, and 
as therefore possessed of moral value, and in not relating it 
vitally to the new redeemed life in man, Anselm left great 
blanks in his doctrine of reconciliation. Only a work of 
signal merit on other grounds could have asserted its influ- 

[77] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

ence as the Cur Deus Homo has done, in spite of such 
drawbacks. 

In discussing Anselm's doctrine attention has been con- 
fined to his own explicit exposition of it. It has often been 
pointed out that in his other writings, especially those of a 
devotional character, utterances are to be found to which 
his doctrine, deduced by rational necessity, fails to do justice. 
The boldest expressions of Scripture are cited and perhaps 
exaggerated, and in particular the distinction between satis- 
faction and punishment is ignored. "Behold," he cries to 
God, "the punishment {poenam) of the God-man, and relieve 
the misery of created man. See the supplicium of the 
redeemer, 1 and forgive the sin of the redeemed." "The 
unrighteous sins and the righteous is punished (punitur) ; the 
guilty is in fault and the innocent is beaten; the ungodly 
offends and the godly is condemned." 2 These expressions 
may indicate that Anselm had more in his soul than he was 
able to bring into his system, or they may represent intense 
emotions which, when it came to the point of construing 
Christ's passion intellectually, he deliberately declined to 
rationalise: in any case they do not affect the interpreta- 
tion of the Cur Deus Homo, nor its value as an authoritative 
exhibition of his mind. 

The most striking defect in Anselm's doctrine — its failure 
to relate the work of Christ to its source in the love of 
God — was apparently made good by his younger contem- 
porary Abalard. In Anselm a primacy seemed to be given 

1 Supplicium is the public punishment inflicted on a criminal as distinct 
from poena, the penalty attached to any kind of offence. 

"Bernard of Clairvaux represents God as saying: "Mihi incumbit sus- 
tinere poenam, poenitentiam agere pro homine quern creavi." On the impos- 
sibility of regarding satisfactio as a legal, and meritum as an ethical, term 
in Anselm, see Loofs' Leitfaden (4th ed.), pp. 508 f. 

[78] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

in God to something else than love — at all events where sin 
was concerned. Sin created an infinite liability which had 
to be dealt with by an infinite satisfaction: that is the one 
necessity in the divine nature which Anselm emphasises. 
Abalard refuses to recognise it. Christ's whole work is for 
him a manifestation of love, and love does not need any 
explanation. It is the universal language which every one 
understands without an interpreter. Christ's death recon- 
ciles us to God, because it is a demonstration of love which 
awakes in us an answer of love, and exactly in proportion 
as it does so justifies the sinful and annuls the punishment 
of their sins. "Our redemption is that supreme love awakened 
in us by the passion of Christ, a love which not only frees us 
from bondage to sin, but wins for us the true liberty of the 
children of God, so that we fulfil all things not so much from 
fear as from love of Him who showed grace to us so great 
that, as He himself tells us (John xv. 13), greater cannot be 
found." * There is an experimental truth in this, but it 
leaves an ultimate question unanswered, or rather unasked. 
The death of Christ can only be regarded as a demonstration 
of love to sinners, if it can be defined or interpreted as having 
some necessary relation to their sins. At the very beginning 
of the CurDeus Homo (r. vi.), Anselm's interlocutor makes it 
plain that there is no proof of love in man's redemption 
through the death of Christ — unless there was no other way in 
which he could be redeemed; in other words, unless this pain- 
ful way was inevitable, and was freely accepted by Christ in 
spite of all its pain. The whole aim of Anselm is to show 
that there was no other way; that there were necessities in 
the divine nature which, if man was to be saved, required a 
satisfaction which they could only have through the incarna- 

*See Baur, Die Christliche Lehre von der Versohnung, p. 194. 

[79] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

tion and passion of the Son of God. He may or may not have 
been felicitous in the exposition of these necessities, but it 
must be admitted that he was dealing with a real question; 
it is not too much to say, with the real question involved in 
the relation of God to sinful man. The traditional language 
of the Church recognised the question, and it was impossible 
for Abalard not to use expressions which implied that it had 
been asked and that an answer of a certain kind commanded 
general acceptance. No one can speak the language of 
Christianity and completely elude or escape its ideas, and 
though, when Abalard speaks of the love of God or of Christ 
as the key to reconciliation, he is usually taken as the repre- 
sentative of subjective theories of atonement — theories which 
find the whole meaning of the work of Christ in its influence 
upon man — he often uses expressions which imply that it 
has also significance in relation to God. He wrote a com- 
mentary on Romans, and the commentator on Romans, who 
does not write with the object of showing his superiority to 
his text, must be a virtuoso in exegetic evasion if he does not 
come on irreducible things in which Paul is rather Anselmic 
than Abalardian. Hence it is not astonishing to find Abalard 
saying that ours was the guilt for which He had to die, and 
that we committed the sin whose penalty He endured ; 1 
though these are manifestly forms of speech which belong 
to another order of thought than that which is conscious and 
predominant in him. So also, while he gives predominance 
to the love of Christ, as the stimulus of love in men, he admits 
that it never does everything in sinners that they need to 
have done; their justification or righteousness is always 
imperfect, and what is wanting in this respect has to be 
supplemented by the righteousness of Christ, and especially 

Riviere, 58 ff. 

[80] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

by His intercession for them. Here the divine and objective 
necessities, which are ignored in the initial emphasis laid on 
love, get a subordinate recognition; in the salvation of sin- 
ners, the righteousness and the intercession of Christ — which 
have no value but Godward — turn out to have an indispens- 
able place. But no stress is laid on this, and Abalard may be 
said to represent subjective doctrines of atonement as fairly as 
Anselm to represent objective ones. At one point in Abalard 
we find a curious assumption of what has been referred to 
above as a non-Christian element in Augustine. The vital 
thing in Anselm is the necessity of satisfaction, its absolute 
divine necessity, which implies the corresponding necessity of 
Christ to make it and so to ensure the forgiveness of sins. But 
Abalard can treat Christ not as the necessary mediator of 
God's grace to the sinful, but — as Augustine sometimes did 
— as merely an example or illustration of that grace. "By 
what merits did this man win His sinless conception, birth, 
and life from beginning to end? (By none), but through the 
grace of the Lord who assumed Him." The logic of this is 
that the grace of which Christ was the most signal illustra- 
tion, and not Christ Himself, is the main thing to think about. 
Abalard expressly argues so in the passage quoted. 1 "He 
then who showed to man so great a grace as to take him into 
personal union with Himself, how should He be unable to 
bestow the lesser grace of forgiving him his sins?" What 
this means is that the forgiveness of sins is not necessarily 
connected with Christ and His work; as far as reconcilia- 
tion is concerned, Christ has no assured place in the Christian 
religion. But neither the New Testament, nor the common 
tradition of Christianity, nor any formal pronouncement of 
any body of Christians, could be alleged in support of such a 

x Baur, op. cit., 193 n. 

[81] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

view. Abalard undoubtedly did great service in emphasis- 
ing the love of Christ and the appeal it makes for love, and 
in bringing the discussion back again from the metaphysical 
to the moral world. But he had not entered deeply enough 
into the moral world himself; passionate and tragic as was 
his career, he had not comprehended, as Anselm had, how 
much sin meant to God, nor what a problem it created for 
the Creator. It is not countered simply by saying "grace" 
— that may be the sola voluntas of Anselm in which the 
problem is not solved but ignored; and if it is answered, 
as it may rightly be, by saying, "Christ," then Christ 
must be defined by relation to the problem created for 
God by sin; and this Abalard never attempted to do. 
In particular the death of Christ has for him no specific 
significance. 

Abalard and Anselm might not unfairly be taken to repre- 
sent the collective mind of the mediaeval Church on redemp- 
tion and reconciliation. We do not find in their successors 
any new ideas, but only varying degrees of responsiveness to 
ideas already to be found in one or the other. The nearest 
approaches to comprehensiveness — it would be going too far 
to say, to system — are to be found in Peter the Lombard 
and Thomas Aquinas. On the whole, Peter has greater 
sympathy with Abalard. "The death of Christ justifies us," 
he writes, "as love is called forth by it in our hearts." 1 He 
quotes with approval the Augustinian saying in which the 
initial love of God is emphasised as in Abalard: "Jam nos 
diligenti Deo reconciliati sumus." 2 He does not agree with 
Anselm about the absolute necessity of the satisfaction made 
by Christ. God could have saved us otherwise if He had so 

1 Petrus Lombardus, Antwerp edition (1757), p. 373. 
*lbid., p. 375. 

[82] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

willed, but of the method actually adopted we can say that 
it was better suited (convenientior) to our wretchedness, and 
that in it the devil was overcome not by the power but by 
the justice of God. It is strange to find this notion of redemp- 
tion from the devil, who is regarded as having rights against 
men which cannot be overridden — a notion so emphatically 
rejected both by Abalard and Anselm — reappearing in the 
Lombard. He even puts it in an offensively aggravated 
form. The cross is a mouse trap, and the blood of Christ 
is the bait with which it is set to tempt the devil. 1 But it 
is stranger still to find side by side with this grotesque myth- 
ology a fragment of Neo-platonic philosophy of which Peter 
also makes use in dealing with the embarrassing problem of 
Satan. He is conscious of its difficulty, and only says with 
regard to it "explicabo ut potero" — I will do my best to un- 
ravel it. He does not feel at liberty to put the devil absolute- 
ly in the right by giving him a claim over man which could 
neutralise the final claim of God. God, he says, did not lose 
man from the law of His power when He allowed him to fall 
into the power of the devil : the devil himself is not beyond the 
scope of God's power, no, nor of His goodness. For, whatever 
be the life of man or devil, it could not subsist but through 
Him who gives life to all things. 2 Here good and being are 
identical, and we are once more in a world in which moral ex- 
perience loses its meaning and real moral questions cannot be 
asked. This is the world in which the devil must be saved, be- 
cause nothing which is can be lost. The questions which after- 

1 Petrus Lombardus, Antwerp edition (1757), p. 373: "Et quid fecit Re- 
demptor captivatori nostro? Tetendit ei muscipulam crucem suam; posuit 
ibi quasi escam sanguinem suum." 

2 Ibid., p. 377. "Quia nee diabolus a potestate Dei est alienus, sicut nee 
bonitate. Nam qualicunque vita diabolus vel homo, non subsisteret nisi per 
eum qui vivificat omnia." 

[83] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

wards vexed some quarters of the Church about the extent of 
Christ's work are distinctly present to Peter's mind and clearly 
answered. Christ offered Himself for all, as far as the suffi- 
ciency of the price is concerned ; but for the elect alone, as far 
as its efficacy goes; for He effected salvation only for those 
predestined to it. But side by side with this he sets the moral 
conditions through which salvation is realised. "Christ by 
His death reconciled all believers to God, inasmuch as all are 
healed from ungodliness who by believing have loved the 
humility of Christ, and by loving have become imitators 
of it." 1 

Thomas Aquinas absorbed into himself more completely 
than any mediaeval theologian all the thoughts of his prede- 
cessors, and he kept his independence in relation to them; 
but though he was extraordinarily powerful, it is difficult 
to think of him as an original mind. His Sum ma Theologica 
is a lake into which many streams have flowed, and from 
which many have drawn, but it is not a spring. To indicate 
the main points of his doctrine in relation to what has been 
already said, is really to give the results of his criticism, not 
the gains of his experience or insight. 

Thomas differs from Anselm in denying the absolute 
necessity of satisfaction. "If God had willed to free man 
from sin without any satisfaction whatever, He would not 
have violated justice." There is no one over God to be in- 
jured by His acting in this way, and therefore this way was 
open to Him. It is difficult to argue about the possibility 
of applying the category of necessity to God, or the senses in 
which it may or may not be applied. Thomas starts with 
the idea that it is inapplicable to God in any sense, as incon- 
sistent with His omnipotence, and so the question is fore- 

1 Petrus Lombardus, Antwerp edition (1757), p. 376. 

[84] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

closed. 1 But omnipotence, which is (so to speak) a natural 
attribute of God, is not so clear a conception that we can 
make use of it to bar questions about what is necessary or 
not necessary for God in the moral world. Thomas himself 
points out that though it was not necessary for Christ to 
suffer necessitate coactionis — by a necessity of outward com- 
pulsion — it was necessary necessitate finis — by the inward 
compulsion of the end He wished to attain. Perhaps this is 
not very far from what Anselm meant. Satisfaction is neces- 
sary, on Anselm's view, if men are to be saved; that is, it 
is necessary necessitate finis. Whether the end itself is neces- 
sary is probably a question on which Thomas and Anselm 
would have agreed: God cannot deny Himself, and though 
we cannot make claims as of right upon Him, it is truer to 
say that all that He does is necessary than that the category 
of necessity does not apply to Him at all. It would not 
apply if necessity were the opposite of freedom, but God is 
the Being in whom freedom and necessity are one. Thomas 
formally puts in the place of necessity convenientia. It was 
convenientius, more to the purpose, that man should be set 
free by the passion of Christ than by the mere will of God. 
We attain in this way greater and better blessings. Thus it 
reveals the love of God, it gives us the example of Christ's 
humility and obedience, it merits for us not only liberation 
from sin but justifying grace and heavenly glory, it is a 
powerful motive to sanctification, and it contributes to the 
dignity of man that in man sin and death should be over- 
thrown. 2 All this sum of advantages is of course related to 
man; it does not touch upon, and therefore it cannot pre- 

x Summa, vi. p. 378. "In Deum autem non cadit aliqua necessitas quia hoc 
repugnaret omnipotentiae ipsius." 
3 Ibid., in. Quaest. xlvi. Art. iii. 

[85] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

judice, the question whether there is or is not a necessity in 
God for dealing with sin by way of satisfaction if man is to 
be delivered from it. 

When Thomas speaks of the mode in which Christ's Pas- 
sion effects its purpose, he makes scrupulous use of all the 
categories which have ever been applied in this connection. 
When we relate it to the divine nature, the Passion of Christ 
acts per modum *efficientiae ; when we relate it to the will of 
Christ's soul, it acts per modum meriti\ when it is considered 
as in the very flesh of Christ, it acts per modum satisfactions, 
inasmuch as we are freed by it from liability to penalty {a 
reatu poenae) ; per modum redemptions, inasmuch as we are 
freed by it from bondage to sin (a servitute culpae) ; per mo- 
dum sacrificii, inasmuch as through it we are reconciled to 
God. Of all these "modes" there are only two of which Thom- 
as has anything new to say, the modus meriti and the modus 
satisfactions, and it is necessary to look at them more closely. 

The notion of meritum appears in Anselm only in connec- 
tion with Christ's death. Christ's death has "merit" as a 
work of supererogation, standing on a different footing in 
relation to God from His life, the obedience in which, as 
already due to God, constituted no merit. In Thomas 
meritum has a different and a far larger place. Christ, he 
says, from the beginning of His conception merited eternal 
salvation for us. 1 The "merit" in the passion is due to its 
not being imposed from without, but voluntarily endured 
{secundum quod aliquis earn voluntarie sustinei) : in other 
words, accepted in the way of obedience to the will of God. 
Obedience is preferred to all sacrifices, and therefore it was 
conveniens that the sacrifice of the passion and death of 
Christ should proceed from obedience. 2 This brings merit, 

1 Summa, in. xlvii. Art. i. 2 Ibid., in. xlvii. Art. ii, 

[86] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

which in Anselm was a precarious plus added to the moral 
world, into the moral world itself, and it also brings Christ's 
death into the same moral whole as His life. Thomas admits 
that the passion had an effect which the praecedentia merita 
had not, but this was due not to its exhibiting greater love, 
but to its being the kind of work which was proper to produce 
that effect. 1 Merit is often an equivocal term, but what it 
seems to imply in Thomas is that the whole work of Christ, 
including His death, must be capable of being morally inter- 
preted. Such an interpretation gives it moral significance 
for the Saviour Himself, and presents it as something not 
alien to those who are to be saved, but capable of a moral 
appropriation by them. The emphasis laid on this in Thomas 
marks a distinct advance on Anselm's theology, if not on his 
piety. 

The idea of satisfaction also assumes a somewhat different 
complexion in Thomas. There are no doubt passages in 
which it seems to bear the same arbitrary character as in the 
Cur Deus Homo. For example, Thomas writes that any 
one makes satisfaction for an offence, in the strict sense of 
the term, who renders to the offended person something his 
love for which is equal to or greater than his hatred of the 
offence. 2 This is in keeping with the idea which makes 
punishment and satisfaction alternatives. But there are 
also passages in which Thomas approaches the view that 
punishment and satisfaction are akin — that punishment 
makes satisfaction, and that satisfaction is penal. Thus he 
says that in the giving up of Christ to die there is shown both 
the severity of God, who would not let sin go unpunished 

1 This seems to be the meaning of a rather difficult passage in Summa, 
Tertia Pars, Quaest. xlviii. Art. i. 
* Summa, m. xlviii. Art. ii. 

[87] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

{sine poena), and the goodness of God, who when man could 
not make a sufficient satisfaction by any penalty he might 
suffer, gave him One to make satisfaction for him. 1 Simi- 
larly in another passage he writes: "It is an appropriate mode 
of making satisfaction for another, when one subjects himself 
to the penalty which another has deserved." 2 This indi- 
cates the line on which, rightly or wrongly, much theological 
speculation proceeded in the future. Instead of being an 
alternative to punishment, satisfaction was regarded as the 
endurance by one of the punishment due to another. 

But the main peculiarity in Thomas is the prominence 
he gives to the idea of the union of Christ and His people — 
of the head and the members. It is in virtue of this unity 
that Christ is able to do anything for His people, and that 
they are able to appropriate and profit by what He does. 
Anselm had indeed insisted on the necessity that the redeemer 
should be of the human stock, but it is with quite another 
emphasis Thomas teaches that He who sacrifices and they 
who are sanctified are all of one. "The head and the members 
are as it were one mystical person, and therefore the satis- 
faction of Christ extends to all believers as to His members." 
"Since grace was given to Christ as to the head of the Church, 
that from Him it might overflow upon His members, it is 
manifest that Christ earned eternal salvation not only for 
Himself, but also for all His members." 3 There is always the 
possibility here of lapsing from the level of the new humanity 
to that of the old, and treating as members of Christ all the 
children of Adam instead of those who are united to Christ 
in some free and spiritual fashion. Thomas does not lapse 
in this way. "When a sufficient satisfaction has been ren- 

1 Summa, hi. xlvii. Art. iii. '* Ibid., *n. 1. Art. i. 

8 Ibid., hi. xlviii. Art. i. 

[88] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

dered," he says, "liability to punishment is removed; but the 
satisfaction of Christ takes effect in us only in so far as we 
become one body with Him as members with their head. 
And the members ought to be conformed to the head." * 
Strictly speaking, this should mean that there must be a 
community of experiences between Christ and those who are 
redeemed by Him. His life and death are a life and death ful- 
filling moral demands which are binding upon them, and the 
experiences of love, obedience, humility, suffering, through 
which He merits salvation for them as for Himself must be- 
come theirs, in union with Him, if they are to have the benefit 
of His satisfaction. But even where this union is insisted on, 
there is the consciousness of a limit of some kind on both 
sides. After all, it is Christ who makes the satisfaction of 
which we avail ourselves in this way — Christ, not we; and 
there is something which, though it may be inspired in us by 
that union, it is still for us to do, not for Him. "Non est similis 
ratio de confessione et contritione, quia satis] 'actio consistit in 
actu exteriori, ad quen assumi possunt instrumenta inter quae 
computantur etiam amici" This sentence shows vividly both 
how consciously the penitential system of the Church was 
being used to interpret the work of Christ, and what diffi- 
culties the interpretation encountered. Penitence consisted 
of three parts, contrition, confession, and satisfaction. It is 
the last alone which Thomas uses to interpret the Passion. 
He cannot bring into his interpretation the contrition and the 
confession. Yet in ordinary human penitence it is the 
contrition and confession which give the satisfaction its 
value, and the "outward act," in which Thomas says satis- 

1 Summa, in. xlix. Art. iii. "Exhibita satisfactione sufficient, tollitur reatus 
poenae . . . satisfactio Christi habet effectum in nobis in quantum incor- 
poramur ei ut membra suo capiti . . . membra autem opertet capiti con- 
formari." 

[89] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

faction consists, must surely have some moral soul to give it 
worth to God. If we as members of His body have to 
enter somehow into the satisfaction of Christ and to make 
it our own, must not He somehow enter, as head of the body, 
into the experience of His members, as with contrite hearts 
they confess their sins to God. 1 It is impossible to read the 
passage just quoted without thinking of Macleod Campbell, 
and if Thomas criticises by anticipation the idea of vicarious 
(or sympathetic) contrition or confession, the impulse to 
do so shows how closely that idea is connected with the 
conception that Christ and His members are one mystical 
body. 

The mediaeval Church in its thoughts on Christ's work did 
not get beyond this point. Satisfaction remained its one in- 
terpretative category. It might be more or less rationalised, 
as in Thomas, or more or less de-rationalised, as in Duns 
Scotus, who makes it merely arbitrary, but it was the one 
idea with which theologians operated in explaining the death 
of Christ. And it must again be noticed that if the atoning 
work of Christ is to be understood through this category, it 
must be a work of objective atonement. The satisfaction 
is meant for God, not for the sinner. Christ represents the 
sinner in making it, but it is made to God who is offended 
by sin. It neutralises or averts His anger, so that hence- 
forth He is not against the sinner but on his side. Apart 
from the satisfaction, the sinner has no hope toward God, 
and yet he knows that in the last resort it is the love of 
God from which the satisfaction itself has come. All medi- 
aeval theologians would have subscribed to Augustine and 
Peter the Lombard : "Jam diligenti reconciliati sumus" — He 

1 "Tantum valuit Christi meritum quantum voluit et potuit ipsum Trinitas 
acceptare." (Quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk [3rd ed.], ii. 158.) 

[90] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

loved us already when we were reconciled to Him. But all 
would also have maintained that our sins are forgiven only 
for Christ's sake — propter Christum, 

The Reformation undoubtedly marks the greatest crisis in 
the history of Christianity, but it is difficult to tell exactly 
the difference it made to the central doctrine of the gospel. 
What it did in principle was to expel things from religion, 
and exhibit all its realities as persons and the relations of 
persons. Grace, for example, ceased to be a thing, or quan- 
tum^ w^iich could be "infused" in man, or administered in ap- 
propriate quantities or qualities through the sacraments ; 1 it 
became the attitude of God to sinners as exhibited in Christ. 
Correspondingly, in principle, faith became the attitude of the 
sinner who gave himself up unconditionally to the God who 
was manifested in Christ as a gracious sin-bearing, sin-forgiv- 
ing God: it was the whole life of such a man, with all its 
promise and potency, and it was as incapable of being supple- 
mented as of being broken up. A consistent hold of the truth 

1 It is impossible to put too strongly the fact that the grace of the gospel in 
the mediaeval Church was a thing, doled out through the sacramental system, 
not the attitude of God in Christ to sinners. It is the same in the modern 
Church of Rome. To complete the doctrine of justification, the Council of 
Trent says (sess. vii. proem) "consentaneum visum est de sanctissimis eccle- 
siae sacramentis agere, per quae omnis vera justitia vel incipit, vel coepta 
augetur, vel amissa reparatur." The Lutheran branch of the Reformation 
Church lapsed far in this direction, but it was against its own principle, and 
in contradiction of the earliest statement of its own faith. "Non justificant 
signa," says Melanchthon in the first edition of the Loci (ed. Kolde S. 235). 
"Apostolus ait: Circumcisio nihil est; ita baptismus nihil est, participatio 
mensae Domini nihil est, sed testes sunt koX <r<ppayt8es divinae voluntatis 
erga te, quibus conscientia tua certa reddatur, si de gratia, de benevolentia 
Dei erga se dubitet . . . Ita sine signo justificari potes, mode credas." To 
emphasize the necessity of the sacrament for justification is to magnify the 
thing at the expense of the person, to subject the higher category to the lower; 
to make justification independent of the sacraments is to give the personal its 
true place in religion, and is alone consistent with the principle of the Refor- 
mation. 

[91] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

that Christianity means the interaction, in the world of per- 
sonal relations, of the sin-bearing, sin-forgiving God and the 
sinner unconditionally abandoning himself to that God in 
Christ, would have required a wholly new theology to match 
it, but to the production of such a theology the Protestant 
Church was for the time unequal. To a large extent it put its 
new wine into old bottles, and it was haunted by the sense of 
a radical inconsistency which it knew not how to overcome. 
A singular illustration of this is given in the second part of 
the Augsburg Confession, in which the first Protestants pre- 
sented their conception of Christianity to Charles v. It begins 
with the words : "Inasmuch as the Churches among us" — that 
is, those which had followed Luther — "dissent in no article 
of faith from the Catholic Church, but only omit some few 
abuses," etc. 1 In a sense this was true, too true ; but it ignores 
the main point that, for the evangelical Christian, faith is 
no longer a maker of "articles" ; it is one whole and indivisi- 
ble thing, the attitude of his sinful soul to God in Christ, his 
new life as a Christian. For better or worse, however, Pro- 
testantism took over from the earlier and inferior type of 
Christianit}', under the heading of "articles of faith," certain 
doctrines or explanations of the Christian life and its pre- 
suppositions, and among other things it took over the doctrine 
of Christ's satisfaction for human sin. 

Luther, it must be allowed, had no enthusiasm for the term. 
It used to be said that there was no reference to Anselm in all 
his works, and that probably he had never read him; but 
even if this is doubtful, 2 Anselm's direct influence on him can 
have been but small. The idea of satisfaction, too, was 

a Conf. Augs., Part II. iniU "Cum ecclesiae apud nos de nullo articulo 
fidei dissentiant ab ecclesiae catholica," etc. ' 

a Loofs, Leitfaden zum Dogmengeschichte [3rd ed.], p. 346, note. 

[92] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

bound up with the penitential system of the mediaeval Church, 
which more than anything roused the indignation of Luther 
as concealing, disguising, and corrupting the gospel. But 
in spite of this, both the term and the idea survived, and if 
they did not come to more prominence in the Reformation 
Churches, they certainly did not fall into the background. 
It is interesting to notice the extent to which authoritative 
utterances coincide in the Roman and the Reformation 
branches of the Church. Thus the fourth article of the Augs- 
burg Confession teaches that men cannot be justified — obtain 
forgiveness of sins and righteousness — before God by their 
own powers, merits, or works; but are justified freely for 
Christ's sake {propter Christum) through faith, when they 
believe that they are received into favour (in gratiani) and 
their sins forgiven for Christ's sake, who by His death satis- 
fied for our sins (propter Christum qui sua morte pro nostris 
peccatis satis fecit). In quite similar words, and with the 
same religious interest in view, the Council of Trent (sess. vi. 
c. 7) declares that the official cause of justification is a merci- 
ful God who freely washes and sanctifies, sealing and anoint- 
ing with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the earnest of our 
inheritance; while the meritorious cause is His most beloved 
and only begotten, our Lord Jesus Christ, who when we were 
enemies, because of the great love with which He loved us, by 
His most holy Passion on the tree of the cross, earned for us 
justification, and made satisfaction for us to God the Father 
(sua sanctissima passione in ligno crucis nobis justificationem 
meruit, et pro nobis Deo Patri satis fecit). It would be im- 
possible to find a more exact correspondence both of thought 
and expression. The Roman Church and the Reformation 
Church agree in holding (1) that sin is freely forgiven; (2) 
that it is forgiven for Christ's sake, propter Christum; and 

[93] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

(3) that we may fairly interpret the last idea — "for Christ's 
sake" — through the idea of a "satisfaction" for sin made by 
Christ. 

In Protestant theology the equivocal character of the idea 
of satisfaction, which has been sufficiently explained, tends to 
disappear. The satisfaction of which the theologians think is 
not the Anselmic one, which has no relation to punishment, 
nor that of the penitential system, which is only quasi-penal, 
but that of Roman law, which is identical with punishment. 
What comes more and more steadily into view is the idea that 
Christ made satisfaction for our sins, by bearing the penalty 
of them in our stead. Even in the Roman Church the satis- 
factions imposed under the penitential system and discharged 
by sinners are called satis factriae poenae" 1 Melanchthon is 
as explicit as words can be: "Deus justitiae suae puniendo 
satisfecit; justitia servatur in recipienda poena" 

But in proportion as men rose above the conception of sin 
and satisfaction, as mere things or abstract ideas, and had 
their faith and attention concentrated on the personal Saviour 
by whom they were reconciled to God, this position became 
intolerable. It left no significance for salvation to anything 
in Jesus except His death. It almost prompts us to ask again, 
as Athanasius did, why He did not die whenever He was born, 
and make the satisfaction in the most direct way. The Chris- 
tian soul felt instinctively that the life of Jesus must come 
into His work somehow as well as His death; wherever we 
see Jesus, in whatever attitude, however engaged, reconcil- 
ing virtue goes out of Him. This was recognised when the 
life of Christ was dragged in, so to speak, side by side with 
His death, and, though it had not the significance of satis- 
faction for sin assigned to it, was nevertheless invested with 

a Conc. Trid. sess. xiv. 8. 

[94] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

another significance equally necessary to salvation. The life 
was the active obedience and the death the passive obedi- 
ence, and though they were alike in respect that both were 
obedience, each fulfilled its separate and independent func- 
tion. Thus the Westminster Confession, in c. xi., repeatedly 
distinguishes in this way the "obedience and satisfaction" of 
Christ, or His "obedience and death," the satisfaction or 
death being the ground on which we are cleared from sin, 
while the obedience constitutes a righteousness of Christ which 
is imputed to believers. The utmost refinements or discrimi- 
nations in this mode of thought were probably to be found in 
the Puritan theologians of America. "Though the Redeemer 
obeyed in suffering and suffered in obeying, and His highest 
and most meritorious obedience was acted out in His volun- 
tary suffering unto death, and in this greatest instance of His 
suffering the atonement which He made chiefly consisted; 
yet His obedience and suffering are two perfectly distinct 
things, and answered different ends, and must be considered 
so, and the distinction and difference carefully and with clear- 
ness kept up in the mind, in order to have a proper under- 
standing of this very important subject. The sufferings of 
Christ, as such, made atonement for sin, as He suffered the 
penalty of the law or the curse of it, the evil threatened to 
transgression, and which is the desert of it, in the sinner's 
stead, by which He opened the way for sinners being deliv- 
ered from the curse, and laid the foundation for reconciliation 
between God and the transgressors, by His not imputing but 
pardoning their sins who believe in the Redeemer and approve 
of His character and conduct. By the obedience of Christ, 
all the positive good, all those favours and blessings are 
united and obtained, which sinners need in order to enjoy 
complete and eternal redemption or everlasting life in the 

[95] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

kingdom of God." 1 More important, however, than any 
such refinements was the persistence of the idea that the 
whole work of Christ, His active and passive obedience, con- 
stituted in some sense a merit or merits, in virtue of which 
men could be reconciled to God. It is to God, in the first 
instance, that the life and death of Christ have value; and 
it is out of regard to their value, jointly or separately — in 
other words, it is propter Christum — that God admits men 
to His peace, or that men are justified or reconciled to God. 
Theologians, from the greatest to the least, are at one here. 
Luther says expressly that the forgiveness of sins is "abver- 
dient" from God ; it is won from Him by the merits of Christ. 2 
In speaking of Christ's intercession, Calvin represents the 
same view with equal explicitness. Christ, he says, turns 
God's eyes to His own righteousness, in such wise that He 
turns them from our sins ; He so reconciles God's mind to us 
as to pave a way of approach for us to His throne ; nay, He 
fills God Himself with grace and clemency, who would other- 
wise for wretched sinners have been full of horror. 3 It is the 
same fundamental strain of thought which is represented 
when the Council of Trent says: "nobis justificationem me- 
ruit" — He earned grace for us. 4 

It is evident that a doctrine of atonement — as the basis of 
the reconciliation of God and man — which can be summar- 
ily exhibited thus, is open to a great deal of criticism. In 
point of fact, it was subjected to a good deal, and it might 
almost be said that the history of Christian thinking on the 
subject throughout a long period, down even to the present 

1 Hopkins's Works, vol. i. 347 f., quoted in Park's collection of Discourses 
and Treatises on the Atonement (Boston, 1859). 
'See Kostlin, Luthers Theologie, ii. 425. 
*Institutio, 11. xvi. 16. *F. supra, p. 93. 

[96] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

day, turned on the destruction or the defence, the supplement- 
ing or the transmuting, of the system of ideas just outlined; 
instead of following the course of this criticism, which is full 
of eddies and cross currents, it will be sufficient to indicate 
in a systematic rather than a chronological way the main 
points on which it fastened. 

It was early alleged that this doctrine of justification and 
reconciliation, in many essential points a doctrine common 
to the Roman and the Reformation Church, contained an 
insoluble contradiction. This contradiction can be put in 
various ways, but principally it was put in these three. 

( 1 ) There is a fatal inconsistency, it was asserted, in trying 
to combine the grace of God and the merits of Christ as 
the ground of forgiveness and reconciliation. You may say 
that God forgives freely (gratuito), or that He forgives for 
Christ's sake {propter Christum), but you cannot say both, 
for they are mutually exclusive. This is the burden of all 
Socinian criticism of the atonement, and it is urged with 
desolating iteration in the work of Socinus De Jesu Chrzsto 
Servatore. If God forgives freely, He does not forgive on the 
basis of a satisfaction made for sins; and if He forgives on 
the basis of a satisfaction, He does not forgive freely. His 
forgiveness, indeed, in the latter case is superfluous, for the 
satisfaction has cleared the score, and there is nothing left 
to forgive. 

Formally and dialectically the Socinian criticism was irre- 
fragable, but its difficulties began when it had to explain 
what it meant by gratuito, and what place Christ filled in 
its doctrine of man's salvation. Socinus never wearies of 
telling us that God determined to forgive sin out of His mere 
and pure benignity: there is nothing in forgiveness but this. 
But is this true? Or is it not rather the indubitable fact 

[97] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

that in Christian forgiveness, in Christian reconciliation, there 
is something besides this? There is Christ. What is the 
Socinian, who lays all the emphasis on gratuito, to do with 
Him? Is it possible to prevent anything as Christianity in 
which Christ is not represented as the Saviour? and if He is 
represented as the Saviour, does not the problem rise again 
for Socinianism which was supposed to have been got rid of 
when the propter Christum of the satisfaction theories was 
dismissed by appeal to the gratuito^ Socinus, who utterly 
repudiates satisfaction, tells us why he still calls Jesus Sav- 
iour. He is our Saviour "because He announced to us the way 
of eternal life, and in His own person, not only by the exam- 
ple of His life, but by rising from the dead, clearly showed it. 
and will give eternal life to us who believe Him {nobis ei 
fidem habentibus). 1 There is nothing in this that distinctly 
refers to sin, forgiveness, reconciliation, or the Passion of 
Jesus, and what is wanting in the opening sentences of So- 
cinus' great work is not made good in the course of it. It 
is the simple truth that he has no rationale of Christ at all 
in relation to forgiveness. In spite of his laborious exegetical 
effort, New Testament experiences and ideas are not the 
inspiration but the stumbling-block of his thoughts. His 
task is not to absorb and assimilate the New Testament 
construction of Christianity, but to explain it away. He 
often speaks of Christ "intervening" between God's decree to 
forgive out of pure mercy, and the taking effect of that decree 
in the actual experience of pardon; but why any one should 
"intervene," why in particular there should be an interven- 
tion so tragic, which has asserted such a reconciling power 
in Christian hearts, he has no idea whatever. It is this which 
explains the curiously non-Christian impression left on the 

1 F. Socinus, De Jesu Christo Servatore: ad init. 

[98] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

mind by the De Jesu Chris to Servatore. There is no sugges- 
tion in it of a personal relation to Jesus, of an infinite debt to 
Him, of an inspiration of which He is the immediate source. 
At the best He is an argument for something else, and even 
if He gets a place in the mind He has no home in the heart. 
If Socinianism were true, no one could ever have written, even 
in a mood of morbid and crazy exaltation, "I am crucified 
with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who 
lives in me." Even the expression "faith in Christ" is ex- 
tremely rare ; it is usually fidem ei habere, or even more disin- 
terestedly, ejus verbis fidem habentes. That this is not an un- 
fair estimate may be shown by the following characteristic 
passage from the De Jesu Chris to Servatore (Pars Secunda, 
c. xiii.). "The death of Christ is said to have expiated our 
sins, not because it either moved God to condone our 
sins, or patched up or made good the guilt of our faults ; but 
because the expiation of our sins, which depended wholly on 
the mercy of God alone, followed immediately on the accom- 
plishment of Christ's suffering {Chris ti supplicio per act o). 
For as soon as Christ had suffered the death of the cross, He 
obtained by God's decree {ex Dei decreto) not only to be 
Himself endowed with immortal and eternal life, but to have 
the power of endowing with the same us who believe Him 
{qui illi fidem hab emus') and are His. And in reality the ex- 
piation of our sins is nothing but our full and permanent lib- 
eration from the death of sin." There could not be a clearer 
indication both that Socinus felt that there was something in 
the whole Biblical and historical estimate of Christ's place in 
redemption, with which he could not but deal, and that his at- 
tempt to deal with it is quite unreal. Non propter hoc, he 
seems to say — thinking of forgiveness and of the death of 
Christ; non propter hoc — sed tamen post hoc, and that ex Dei 

[99] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

deer e to! It is not respectful to the decree of God to deny it, 
in this fashion, anything but a purely arbitrary character. 

Theologians who felt the formal logic of Socinus unim- 
peachable were not so much affected by it, just because they 
felt at the same time that he evaded the problem to which 
their logical perplexities were due. Those perplexities did 
not emerge into consciousness for the first time when the Ref- 
ormation doctrine of Christ's satisfaction for sin was defined. 
They were present to the mind of Augustine when he wrote 
"et quando nos oderat diligebat." They are present to the 
mind of everybody who feels, as Christians have felt from the 
beginning, that in Christ God somehow takes part with sin- 
ners against Himself. He is estranged and offended by sin — 
this is not an imagination but an experience of the sinner; and 
the sinner finds Him a gracious God — and this also is not 
imagination but experience — not in a way to which Christ 
does not matter, but only in Christ. In point of fact, the 
gratuito and the propter Christum are experimentally quite 
consistent, and the only difficulty is to find a statement which 
will do justice to this experienced fact. To play off the one 
expression against the other, as Socinianism does, however 
logical it may be in form, is in fact a mere irrelevance. 

Of those who maintained the truth of the propter Christum 
side by side with that of the gratuito none shows a more can- 
did appreciation of the Socinian difficulties than Calvin 
(though the Institutio Chris tianae Religionis is more than 
forty years earlier than the De Jesu Chris to Servatore). Cal- 
vin formally raises the question how it is consistent to say 
that God, who comes to meet us with His mercy, is our enemy 
until He is reconciled to us through Christ. He seems to argue 
that this, which is the ordinary way of putting it, is rather de- 
signed to make sinners feel how wretched and disastrous is 

[100] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

their lot apart from Christ, than to give adequate expression 
to the truth: it is speaking, as Paul says, "after the manner 
of men," and is not to be pressed. But though the weakness 
of our faculties is allowed for in this mode of speech, it is 
not false. 1 It conveys the true impression that it is only 
through Christ that sinners have a standing with God. The 
ultimate truth, that which is covered by gratuito, is stated 
by Calvin with all the distinctness which could be desired. 
"Sua dilectione praevenit et antevertit Deus Pater nostram in 
Christo reconciliationem" It was because He first (prius) 
loved, that He afterwards {posted) reconciled us to Himself. 
When Calvin tries formally to conciliate this first love of 
God — this absolutely free grace — with the doctrine that 
Christ merited for us forgiveness of sins, what he does is to 
make the merit of Christ depend on the grace of God. "Chris- 
tus nonnisi ex Dei beneplacito quidquam mereri potuit . . . 
ex sola Dei gratia {quae hunc nobis constituit salutis modum) 
dependet meritum Christi." The same way of meeting — or 
evading — the same difficulty is taken in the Westminster 
Confession (c. xi. 3), where, after a declaration of the 
"proper, real, and full satisfaction" made by Christ to the 
Father's justice on behalf of sinners, we are told with equal 
emphasis that "inasmuch as He was given by the Father for 
them, and His obedience and satisfaction accepted in their 
stead, and both freely, not for anything in them, their justifi- 
cation is only of free grace." Whether this was or was not 
the right way to define the relation of the gratuito to the 
propter Christum — of free grace to the merits of Christ— the 
truth, it was felt, lay in the antinomy, and was lost when one 
element of it was used merely to reject the other. 

1 Inst. Chr. Relig., n. xvi. 3: "Atqui hoc tametsi pro captus nostri infirmi- 
tate dicitur, non tamen falso." 

[101] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

It is a remarkable fact that in wrestling with this problem 
Calvin falls back on Augustine's idea that Christ Himself 
is the most shining illustration of free grace. It was not 
by merits either of faith or works that He attained the dignity 
of Saviour. On the contrary, the grace by which any man, 
from the beginning of his faith, is made a Christian is the 
very same grace by which this man, from His beginning, is 
made the Christ. 1 Of all ways of subsuming the merits of 
Christ under the grace of God this, for the unsophisticated 
Christian mind, is probably the least attractive or convinc- 
ing, and it strikes one oddly, after following Calvin into an 
atmosphere so rare, to find him snubbing Peter the Lombard 
and other scholastics for stulta curiositas and temeraria 
definition 

(2) A second way in which the contradiction between the 
gratuito and the propter Christum was brought out was this. 
If, it was said, Christ is God's free gift to men, and makes 
satisfaction to God for men's sins, clearly God is supposed 
to make satisfaction to Himself. To the Socinian criticism 
this was the ne plus ultra of absurdity. But again it was felt 
that an attack upon the form might leave the substance un- 
affected. Formally it might seem a flat contradiction that 
God should make satisfaction to Himself; or if not a flat 
contradiction, the work of making satisfaction would have 
the same kind of unreality as a game of draughts in which 
a man plays his right hand against his left. But really this 
was not the case. The question at issue is not so much 
whether God forgives, but how; not even whether He for- 
gives freely, but whether His free forgiveness is easy or diffi- 
cult, costly or cheap, an unspeakable gift or a trivial one. 
It was a sound instinct that made the Church as a whole 

1 Institutio Christianae Religionis, ii. 17. See p. 81, supra. 

[102] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

cling to the idea of a difficult, costly, and overpowering 
forgiveness, and reject and even resent a criticism of the 
idea of satisfaction — and of God as making satisfaction to 
Himself — by which the character of forgiveness was imper- 
illed. There are divine necessities which must be asserted in 
the very act of pardoning and reconciling — there are princi- 
ples or realities to which justice must be done — if forgiveness 
is to be the unspeakable and inspiring gift it ought to be, and 
in genuine Christianity is: and this vital truth is covered, 
it may be inadequately or infelicitously, but still effectively 
enough for the ordinary Christian mind, when we say that 
in the very process by which He forgives, God makes satis- 
faction to Himself in Christ. The fact that Christ, to put 
it so, is not only, as in Socinianism, the preacher of a forgive- 
ness which exists in entire independence of Him, but the 
incarnation or embodiment of all that is meant by forgive- 
ness in the gospel, secures for forgiveness its passionate and 
tragic character. However we ought to express it, there is a 
satisfaction to God at the heart of it without which it could 
not be bestowed. 

(3) The third way of exhibiting the contradictions in- 
volved in the common doctrine of reconciliation was to point 
out that it rested on the assumption of an internal contradic- 
tion in God Himself. All doctrines of satisfaction — so it 
was argued — implied an inner schism in God's nature. The 
divine attributes were at war, and it was in reality they which 
had to be reconciled. God's mercy pulled Him in one direc- 
tion, and His justice in another. His mercy urged Him to 
forgive the sinner freely, but His justice was inexorable, on 
the other side, and, till its demands were satisfied, God's 
pardoning love could not have free course. In this way a 
division was made in God Himself — which was inconceiv- 

[103] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

able; and a primacy was given to justice as against love — 
which was contradictory to Scripture. 

The doctrine of the divine attributes is as difficult as any 
in theology, but some things in it are fairly plain. The 
Socinian criticism was quite right in asserting that there 
could be no schism in God. Justice is in no sense at war 
with mercy. The opposite of justice is not mercy, but injus- 
tice, and God is never either unmerciful or unjust. He is 
just when He exercises His mercy, and He is merciful when 
He exercises justice. This is quite sound, and quite generally 
admitted. But the criticism which pointed it out was re- 
garded with suspicion because it was believed to be only an- 
other mode of that same criticism which by sinking the -prop- 
ter Christum in the gratuito, or the merits of Christ in the 
absolute grace of God, offered in the long run a Christianity 
in which Christ had no essential place. Instead of finding in 
Christ the proof of a love in which justice is done to the 
whole and indivisible character of God, the tendency of this 
criticism was to assert a love in God so unconditional, so akin 
to a physical force, that any definite relation of it to right- 
eousness disappeared, and the very presence of Christ in the 
world, to say nothing of His Passion, had no vital connec- 
tion with reconciliation. In principle, Christ and His Passion 
were superfluous ; or, if they had a certain value for impress- 
ing men, they were quite unessential to God. As this, for the 
common Christian consciousness, is an impossible conclusion, 
the tension (so to speak) between the divine attributes was 
endured, to avoid worse. The mockery of Strauss, for whom 
the tension of justice and mercy is resolved, in Christ's satis- 
faction, just as in the parallelogram of forces the tension of 
two opposing pulls is resolved along a diagonal line, was 
as little able as the Socinian dialectic to dislodge from the 

[104] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

Christian mind something which at this point it felt to be 
involved in its faith and experience. It does get in Christ 
and His passion, what it gets nowhere else, the assurance that 
forgiveness is something in which all the divine attributes — 
the justice of God as well as His mercy, His severity as well 
as His goodness — get their due. And as such an assurance 
is indispensable, it clings to it for its life in spite of formal 
logical difficulties. 

Besides this line of criticism, which dwelt in such various 
forms on the essential contradiction of the grace of God and 
the merits of Christ, there was another largely represented 
in the Church. It had its motive in the feeling that the 
doctrine of reconciliation had become, so to speak, too objec- 
tive; it was being regarded too exclusively as the doctrine 
of a work of Christ which had value for God, but which had 
no security for taking effect in man. It was outside of us, 
and there only. It had reference, it might seem, only to 
the past; it achieved for men the forgiveness of sins, but 
even when forgiveness was appropriated by faith and the 
believer justified, there was no security for the new life. 
The work of Christ had not been denned in such a way as 
to guarantee this. It even became a point of orthodoxy to 
distinguish sharply between justification, or the righteous- 
ness of Christ imputed to faith, and sanctification, or the 
new character wrought in the justified by the Holy Spirit. 
It was in the former alone that the sinner had standing in 
the sight of God ; the latter was rather the moral vindication 
of the gospel than an essential element in it. The former, 
justification, had the completeness of the work of Christ; 
the latter, sanctification, had the imperfection of everything 
in which man is participant. But though imperfect it was 
real, and a sound instinct taught men, in spite of orthodoxy, 

[105] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

that it is much more important that justification and sancti- 
fication should be inseparable, than that they should be dis- 
tinguished. Hooker, in his famous sermon on Justification, 
strongly urges the distinction. "St. Paul," he writes, "doth 
plainly sever these two parts of Christ's righteousness from 
one another," • and he thinks it important to insist on this 
understanding of St. Paul. Chalmers, out of a wide experi- 
ence of the effects of distinguishing justification and sancti- 
fication — in other words, of a too exclusively objective view 
of the work of Christ — betrays a different concern: "I think 
that holiness is looked upon by some evangelical writers in 
rather a lame and inadequate point of view. They value it 
chiefly as an evidence of justifying faith. They are right in 
saying that it gives no title to God's favour, 2 but they are 
wrong in saying that its chief use is to ascertain that title, 
or to make that title clear to him who possesses it. It is in 
fact chiefly valuable on its own account. It forms a part and 
an effective part of salvation." 3 No simple mind could ever 
be insensible to this, and the doctrine of an objective satis- 
faction, a finished work of Christ, outside of us, had no sooner 
taken definite shape, than a consciousness arose that it was 
not related as it ought to be to the new life of the believer, 
and that if it were not open to criticism upon other grounds, 
it at least required more adequate statement. 

The earliest protest in this sense was made by the Reforma- 
tion theologian Osiander. He taught justification by faith, 
but interpreted it "mystically," not legally. It did not 
consist in the imputation of Christ's righteousness, but in 

looker, Works, ii. 607 (Oxford, 1865). 

*Cf. Hooker, ut supra, p. 609. "The best things we do have somewhat in 
them to be pardoned." 
* Life, by Hanna, ii. 184. 

[106] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

the essential indwelling of God in the soul, mediated through 
faith. His favourite text was Jer. xxiii. 6, "The Lord is our 
righteousness." Justification is not a moral opiate, which 
the mere imputation of another's righteousness might be al- 
leged to be; it is the promise and potency, or rather it is 
the very presence, of a new righteousness in the heart, identi- 
cal with Christ's inhabiting there. There is no justification in 
which sanctification is not at the same time involved. The 
ceaseless controversies in which Osiander lived make it 
difficult to give any representation of his views which will 
not be contested, but the motive of his thoughts is unques- 
tionable. He seems to have held that when Christ came to 
earth from heaven, He brought with Him His divine and 
eternal righteousness; it was this which He maintained all 
through His career, and this also — not any righteousness 
achieved in His life on earth — which becomes the possession 
of those in whose hearts He dwells by faith. Yet he believed 
that Christ on the cross made satisfaction for sin to the 
righteousness of God, and that the merit of Christ is the 
ground on which the essential divine righteousness becomes 
ours. Newman was conscious of an affinity to Osiander, 1 
and the motive of his Lectures on Justification is much the 
same as that of the sixteenth century theologian. "There 
really must be ... in every one who is justified, some such 
token or substance of his justification"; 2 there must be 
something real and not merely imputed. So again, if we 
except the first clause, it is quite in the line of Osiander 
when Newman writes : 3 "Justification comes through the 
sacraments; is received by faith; consists in God's inward 
presence, and lives in obedience." Upholders of the orthodox 

1 Lectures on Justification, p. 387 f. 

9 Ibid., p. 131. *Ibid., p. 275. 

[107] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

doctrine would not all have admitted that it was open to 
the kind of criticism here in view, 1 but the evidence of 
observers so unlike as Chalmers and Newman is conclusive 
as to the direction in which it tended to degenerate. A fin- 
ished work of Christ, outside of us, and not directly related 
to a new life — a justification not organically related to sancti- 
fication — was undoubtedly a moral peril. Romanists might 
pretend to guard against it by the doctrine that justification 
comes through the sacraments — initially through baptism, 
and afterwards through penance — conferring as they do grace 
ex opere operator and predestinarians, Calvinist or other, 
might evade all such difficulties by teaching that the work of 
Christ avails for the elect alone, and takes effect in them as 
an irresistible grace, by which all God's ends are infallibly 
secured; but those to whom sacramental grace and predes- 
tination are not solutions of any problem, but counsels of 
moral and intellectual despair, are undoubtedly in a diffi- 
culty. They must admit that a doctrine of Christ's work 
is wanted in which the new life is not an addendum, or a 

*The charge that the doctrine of satisfaction, or of an objective atonement, 
is inevitably immoral in effect is strongly urged by Socinus, De Jesu Christo 
Servatore, Pars in. c. xi. But it was familiar much earlier. The Augsburg 
Confession c. xx. presupposes it when it writes: "Falso accusantur nostri quod 
bona opera prohibeant" etc. It may indeed be traced back to the apostolic 
age ("Let us do evil, that good may come," Rom. iii. 8; "Let us continue in 
sin that grace may abound," Rom. vi. i) ; and the very fact that the Pauline 
gospel and the orthodox satisfaction theory were open to the same accusation 
or perversion was used as an argument for their identity. There is an odd 
kind of composure, not to say complacency, in the way in which Hopkins 
(quoted in Park, ut supra, pp. 95-6) limits the effect of the atonement to the 
past. "The atonement, therefore, only delivers from the curse of the law, 
and procures the remission of their sins who believe in Him, but does not 
procure for them any positive good; it leaves them under the power of sin, 
and without any title to eternal life, or any positive favour or actual fitnes9 
or capacity to enjoy positive happiness." This is the style of a schoolman 
perhaps, but not of an evangelist or an apostle. 

[108] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

casual consequence merely, but the end which that work 
has in view from the beginning, and which it is divinely 
adapted to secure. To use words which are useful, though 
apt to be misunderstood : the work of reconciliation must have 
justice done to its subjective as well as its objective reference; 
the doctrine must recognise its ultimate effect in man as well 
as its value for God. 

In addition to these more or less articulate criticisms (l) 
of the inconsistency between satisfaction and free forgiveness, 
an inconsistency coming into consciousness in various forms, 
and (2) of the inadequacy with which the work of Christ 
was related to the new life in man, there was a further ground 
of dissatisfaction with the doctrine in a growing sense of its 
artificiality. Somehow or other, it had lost contact with 
experience. Its purpose was to explain how men are recon- 
ciled to God, to give an intelligible rationale of the process; 
but reconciled men failed to find in it a convincing reflection 
of the manner in which the reconciling power of God in 
Christ had taken effect in their souls. There was too much 
apparatus in it, and too little personality. In particular, 
men came to feel that there was something about it incon- 
sistent with the nature of saving faith. Unconsciously, 
faith in a person was being displaced in favour of faith in 
articles. A lex credendi, including human definitions of satis- 
faction and merit, of active and passive obedience, of imputa- 
tion and of divine indwelling, arose, if it was not erected, 
between the soul and the reconciling love of God in Christ. 
Access to God as Saviour, which the gospel makes free to all, 
or which it conditions only by entire surrender to Him, was 
virtually blocked by a preliminary demand for orthodoxy. 
"Clear views of. truth," as they used to be called approvingly, 
were the way of salvation; and these clear views of truth 

[109] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

were given in definitions made by men. The gospel was 
intellectualised, not only in the good sense that saved men 
applied their minds to it, as they had proved it in experience, 
but in the bad sense that it was presented in a form which 
might or might not satisfy the wise and prudent, but was 
certainly of no use to babes. It is this criticism by life which 
really discredits imperfect doctrines, and it can hardly be 
questioned that under it the traditional doctrine of recon- 
ciliation suffered severely. 

In the century following the Reformation there was only 
one outstanding attempt made to rehabilitate the doctrine 
of satisfaction as against the Socinian criticism^ This was 
the once celebrated Defensio fidei catholicae de satis factione 
Chris ti by Grotius. It was published in 1617, but though it 
affected to be a defence of the Catholic faith about the satis- 
faction of Christ, and used the language of the established 
doctrine with the utmost freedom, it in effect put something 
quite different in its place. The orthodox doctrine made 
Christ's satisfaction penal; Christ made satisfaction by 
bearing the punishment of sin. To begin with, Grotius 
seems frankly to accept this view. With every kind of 
emphasis he reiterates the penal character of Christ's suffer- 
ings. The whole of his first chapter is occupied with the 
exegetical vindication of this "catholic" conception against 
the exegetical caprices of Socinus. "God," he writes, "moved 
by His goodness to do us a signal benefit, but hindered by 
our sins which deserved punishment, determined that Christ 
voluntarily out of His love towards men should pay the pen- 
alty of our sins (poenas penderet pro peccatis nostris) by 
enduring the sorest torments and a bloody and shameful 
death, that we, subject to the demonstration of God's jus- 
tice (salva divinae justitiae demonstratione) , should on condi- 

[no] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

tion of true faith be freed from the penalty of eternal death 
(a poena mortis aeternae)." So again he says, "to bear sins 
by suffering, and that in such wise that others are thereby 
set free, can indicate nothing else than the taking upon one of 
another's punishment" (poenae alienae susceptionem). He 
explicitly applies this to the case in hand. "The exaction 
of penalty and the affliction of Christ are of one piece (co~ 
haerent)" We are justified or freed from the divine penalty, 
and that this might be, Christ was made sin — that is, poenam 
divinam tulit. The cross of Christ, therefore, he concludes, 
"poenae rationem habuit" If it is too strong to render this, 
"was of the nature of punishment," it at least implies that it 
cannot be understood unless we can interpret it by relation 
to punishment. And as if to leave no opening for ambiguity, 
he writes boldly, "Est ergo punitio in Deo active, in Christ o 
passive." Yet when he comes to the point, this is not what 
he establishes as the real character of Christ's sufferings. 
Penal suffering would be determined simply by sin, it would 
be what the sinner deserved according to the law; it would 
be his sin finding him out and returning on his own head. It 
would be inflicted by a judge according to the terms of a 
statute; it would be an exercise of retributive and distri- 
butive justice. But when Grotius thinks, not through the 
orthodox doctrine which he set out to defend, but spontane- 
ously, this is not what he finds in the Christian religion. 
God, to Grotius, is not a private person, as He is to Socinian 
criticism. Grotius points out the inapplicability to God of 
the categories so frequent in Socinus — pars offensa, creditor, 
dominus, etc. Neither, however, as on the orthodox theory 
of penal satisfaction, is God a judge, formally administering 
criminal law. He is not Judex, but Rector or Ruler, and 
when we think of Him in this character our conception of 

[mi 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

what we call punishment changes. It is not the inexorable re- 
action of sin against the sinner; it is not the self-vindication 
of the law; from the ruler's point of view it has an ulterior 
object which determines its character. The right of punishing 
does not exist for the sake of Him who punishes, but for the 
sake of some common interest {causa alicujus communitatis) . 
For every punishment has as its aim the common good {bo- 
num commune) ; in the hands of the Rector it has in view the 
interest of the regnum. Every positive penal law — that is, 
every law attaching a certain punishment to a certain offence 
— is, without qualification, relaxabilts; a dispensation can be 
granted from it as long as the bonum commune is secured. 
What God does as ruler, in the case of Christ's satisfaction, 
is to grant a dispensation from the penal law on a condition 
which secures that the common interest shall not be preju- 
diced. The common interest is that reverence for God and 
His law should be maintained, and this is secured when 
forgiveness comes in such an awful and impressive way as 
through Christ's sufferings. Looked at strictly, we cannot 
say that Christ's sufferings are determined by the actual sins 
of men ; they have no proper relation to anything men have 
actually done; they have in view rather possible and pro- 
spective sins, and their purpose is by arresting these to give 
God's love room to operate. Christ does not suffer the pen- 
alty of sin, in spite of the language which Grotius uses so 
freely in his opening chapter; He suffers something which 
may be said to be equivalent to that penalty, because in the 
government of the world it serves the same purpose — the 
maintenance of order and of reverence for the law as safe- 
guarding the common good. But what it is Christ suffers, 
or what it is in His sufferings which gives Him this virtue, 
Grotius does not tell. There is something arbitrary in the 

[112] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

death of Christ — something which reminds us irresistibly of 
Scotus and Socinus, and which takes us out of the region of 
rational and moral necessities where alone the mind can 
breathe. Notwithstanding these inconsistencies and draw- 
backs, the short treatise of Grotius had enormous influence. 
It introduced a new conception of God, which, whether or 
not it was adequate to the Christian truth, acted as a powerful 
stimulus to thought. It provoked more searching study of 
such ideas as law and punishment. It directed attention to 
the effect of Christ's work on men as well as on God — to the 
new life, as well as to the maintenance of God's honour or the 
satisfaction of His law. It helped to remove the ban of indi- 
vidualism, and to revive the idea of the Kingdom of God by 
its emphasis on the idea of a common good. Holland and 
New England were profoundly affected by it, and its very 
confusions were in its favour. It insinuated new ideas while 
professing merely to defend the old, and men through it got 
the benefit of all the truth there was both in old and new. 

With the disintegration of the satisfaction theory, the 
natural tendency was to regard forgiveness as easy and 
cheap. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, when 
Rationalism was in vogue, sin was not thought very serious, 
nor forgiveness very hard. The one was apt to be discounted, 
and the other as nearly as possible taken for granted. Only 
men who had felt the sinfulness of sin, and their own ina- 
bility to vanquish it without divine help, would have in their 
minds the motives which gave birth to the theory; conse- 
quently they only would have a natural sympathy with it. 
Curiously enough, the two greatest intellectual forces of the 
period on the Continent stood here on opposite sides. Kant, 
with his austere morality, taught the presence in man of a 
radical evil, an intimate and constitutional badness, which 

[113] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

in itself presents us with an insoluble problem. 1 This is the 
negative premiss of Christianity as a doctrine of redemption 
and reconciliation, and whether Kant did or did not person- 
ally accept the Christian way of handling the problem, he 
was so far on the Christian side as to recognise that it was 
there. He reduced the satisfaction of Christ to the idea that 
always the new man must bear the sins of the old ; when the 
bad man becomes good, it is by accepting the punishment 
of his iniquities, and as a new creature expiating through 
sorrow and suffering the sins of his past. Kant's younger 
contemporary Goethe stood at the opposite pole. He had 
no difficulty about admitting the hereditary and other defects 
of human nature; among the multitudinous experiences of 
his all-experiencing life he had at one time breathed the 
atmosphere of the Moravian Brotherhood, and apparently 
thought himself entitled to be at home in it. But the Breth- 
ren would not regard him as a Christian; not even his own 
and his mother's friend, Fraulein von Klattenberg would do 
so. It was only by accident that he discovered why. He 
had no adequate sense of evil, and therefore no adequate 
sense of the total dependence of man on grace. As his 
friends pointed out to him, when he unfolded his view of 
human nature, he was a genuine Pelagian, and could have 
no unity with those who thought as they did of sin and re- 
demption. But to have this pointed out did not make him 
penitent. On the contrary, he gloried in the very thing they 
censured. Kant's doctrine revolted him. He reproached 
the philosopher with sinning against himself, and charged 
him with "impiously beslobbering his philosopher's gown 
with the stain of radical evil." If the Goethean conception 
of human nature, working like a leaven in men's minds, 

1 Die Religion inner halb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft: Erstes Stuck. 

[in] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

tended to destroy interest in a divine work of redemption 
and reconciliation, the Kantian one had the opposite effect. 
Just in proportion as men felt the enormous power of the 
evil which was in them to disable and defeat them morally, 
they were prepared to listen to a gospel which met this evil 
not with a mere proclamation of pardon, but with a demon- 
stration of redeeming love definitely related to the evil itself. 
Granting that the doctrine of satisfaction did not do justice 
to what God had done in Christ to annul sin and reconcile 
men to Himself, it at least recognised that to do something 
was necessary; it busied itself with the real problem, and 
men always hovered round it anew. 1 The old questions were 
asked with new depth and subtlety, and the work of Christ 
in reconciling man to God was never more eagerly studied 
than when sentence of futility seemed to have been passed 
on all previous efforts to understand it. 

It is not possible to follow in detail the course of Christian 
thinking on reconciliation during the last century and a quar- 
ter; indeed it is not possible to say that it has had any definite 
course at all. But it does no injustice to other theologians, 
if we say that the original contributions which have been 
made to the subject are represented in Schleiermacher's Der 
christliche Glaube (1821), Macleod Campbell's The Nature 
of the Atonement ( 1856), and Ritschl's Die christliche Lehre 
von der Rechtfertigung und Versbhnung ( 1870-74). 2 

One characteristic of all these books is that, to a far greater 
degree than those which preceded them, they rest on the 
basis of history and experience. They are all conscious of 

1 Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung u. Wahrheit, Buch xv. ad init. See Biel- 
schowsky's Goethe, ii. 95 f. 

2 An English translation has appeared of the first (the historical) volume 
of Ritschl's work, and of the last (the systematic) ; the second (the exegetical) 
has not been translated. 

["5] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Jesus as well as of the Christ, and conscious that, whatever 
the work of the Christ may be, it must arise naturally out of 
the life of Jesus. He is not conceived as here to carry out 
any plan of salvation, but He is the Saviour by being what 
He is, doing what He does, and suffering what He surfers, as 
the relations in which He finds Himself require. There is 
nothing artificial in the work of the Saviour; it is ethical 
in its inspiration and its achievement from beginning to 
end. 

It is ethical also in the mode of its appropriation. The 
two German writers, to avoid risks in different directions, 
lay stress here on the idea of the Church. Perhaps what 
Schleiermacher is most afraid of is magic, the kind of appro- 
priation of Christ and His grace which is taught in the sacra- 
mental doctrines of the Church of Rome. We are conscious, 
he says, of all approximations to blessedness which occur in 
the Christian life, as being based on a new and divinely af- 
fected common life (Gesammtleben) which counteracts the 
common life of sin and the misery developed there. 1 It is 
this continuity with a collective and therefore objective 
Christianity which secures its historical, ethical, non-fana- 
tical, non-magical character in the individual. Otherwise 
Schleiermacher emphasises what he calls its mystical char- 
acter. But by mystical he only means that the truth of 
Christianity cannot be realised except through Christian ex- 
perience; it cannot be antecedently demonstrated, on purely 
rational grounds, with a view to experience. Sacramental- 
ism is not mystical but magical. Mysticism, on the other 
hand, in the sense of a direct and immediate contact between 
Christ and the believing soul, is Ritschl's bugbear, and the 
Church, in the ethical life of which the Christianity of the 

x Der christliche Glaube, § 87. 

[116] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

individual is kept within sound moral limits, is part of his 
defence against it. 1 

Macleod Campbell distinguishes more emphatically than 
either Schleiermacher or Ritschl Christ's dealing with men 
on the part of God and His dealing with God on the part 
of men. It is in connection with the last that he introduces 
the peculiar phraseology which has proved at once so attrac- 
tive and so repellent in the exposition of his ideas. "That 
oneness of mind with the Father, which towards man took 
the form of condemnation of sin, would, in the Son's dealing 
with the Father in relation to our sins, take the form of a 
perfect confession of our sins. This confession, as to its own 
nature, must have been a perfect Amen in humanity to the 
judgment of God on the sin of man. . . . Let us consider this 
Amen from the depths of the humanity of Christ to the divine 
condemnation of sin. What is it in relation to God's wrath 
against sin 4 ? What place has it in Christ's dealing with that 
wrath*? I answer: He who so responds to the divine wrath 
against sin, saying, "Thou art righteous, O Lord, who judg- 
est us," is necessarily receiving the full apprehension and 
realisation of that wrath, as well as of that sin against which 
it comes forth, into His soul and spirit, into the bosom of 
the divine humanity, and, so receiving it, He responds to it 
with a perfect response, — a response from the depths of that 
divine humanity, — and in that perfect response He absorbs 
it. For that response has all the elements of a perfect re- 
pentance in humanity for all the sin of man,— a perfect 
sorrow — a perfect contrition — all the elements of such a 
repentance, and that in absolute perfection, all- — excepting 
the personal consciousness of sin; — and by that perfect re- 
sponse in Amen to the mind of God in relation to sin is the 

1 Rechtfertigung und Versohnung (3rd ed.), iii- 107 f. Also 168 f. 

[117] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

wrath of God rightly met, and that is accorded to divine jus- 
tice which is its due, and could alone satisfy it." 1 The main 
thing here is that Christ enters sympathetically, as His rela- 
tion to man required Him to do, into the whole state and re- 
sponsibilities of His sinful brethren, making their burden 
His own, as far as it was possible for love to do so; and this 
is undoubtedly a great thing whatever we may think of the 
description of it as vicarious repentance or vicarious confes- 
sion. Something akin to it had been expressed long before by 
Jonathan Edwards the elder, a writer to whom Macleod 
Campbell owes much, as indeed we often owe much to those 
to whom we are most opposed. "A very strong and lively 
love and pity towards the miserable tends to make their case 
ours ; as in other respects, so in this in particular, as it doth in 
our idea place us in their stead, under their misery, with a 
most lively, feeling sense of that misery, as it were feeling it 
for them, actually suffering it in their stead by strong sympa- 
thy.''' 2 In earlier theologians the idea that Christ was man's 
substitute or representative in the work of making atonement 
had too much lost its connection with love : it had become part 
of the plan of salvation, and its ethical character was im- 
paired. But now, as Bushnell is fond of expressing it, vica- 
riousness is seen to be only another name for love ; under the 
influence of love men make the case of others their own ; and 
even if we speak of Christ as our substitute, it is because love 
has impelled Him to make our situation His. 

Side by side with the altered emphasis at this point comes 
a new sense that what Christ does for us must be more defi- 
nitely related to what He produces in us. His identification 

1 The Nature of the Atonement, 5th ed., p. 116 ff. 

2 The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises, with an introduction by Prof. 
E. A. Park, p. xxxix. 

[118] 



IN THE CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE PAST 

of Himself with us must have as its aim and issue an iden- 
tification on our part of ourselves with Him. The vocabu- 
lary of imputation, if not displaced by that of identification, 
is interpreted through it. There may be a tendency to ignore 
limits and distinctions, but there is a genuine desire to secure 
a true and real union between Christ and those who are His. 
His work is to save men from their sins, not to save them 
from the experience of being saved, which only comes in 
proportion as they become one with Him. If He is not really 
changing us into His own likeness, and enabling us to enter 
into the experiences in which sin involved Him, He is not 
reconciling us to God, and our sins are not forgiven. This 
is maintained even while it is maintained at the same time 
that Christ does something for us which we could never have 
done for ourselves, and enables us to do in union with Him- 
self what we could never do alone; and if our union with 
Him is His work, His position as Saviour is unimpaired. 

It will not be denied that in such thoughts as these person- 
ality gets the place, or something like the place, which is its 
due. It had this place for a moment in the new experience 
of the gospel at the Reformation, but it proved unable then 
to assert it theologically. But now the personality of Jesus — 
the personal, which is also the ethical, character of all He 
does or suffers in relation to sin — the personal quality of the 
response made to Him and His work, the response of an in- 
divisible faith in which we identify ourselves with Him, as 
He has identified Himself with us — all come out in a new re- 
lief. One advantage of this is that categories of quantity, 
which have no meaning where personality is concerned, are 
quite inapplicable to the work of Christ. The questions once 
so fiercely debated about the extent of the atonement have no 
meaning. The humiliating sophistries with which Scripture 

[119] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

was tortured to make it mean the very opposite of what is 
written broad upon its face, need vex us no more. Of all 
books that have ever been written on the atonement, as God's 
way of reconciling man to Himself, Macleod Campbell's is 
probably that which is most completely inspired by the spirit 
of the truth with which it deals. There is a reconciling 
power of Christ in it to which no tormented conscience can 
be insensible. The originality of it is spiritual as well as 
intellectual, and no one who has ever felt its power will 
cease to put it in a class by itself. In speculative power he 
cannot be compared to Schleiermacher, nor in historical learn- 
ing to Ritschl, and sometimes he writes as badly as either; 
but he walks in the light all the time, and everything he 
touches lives. 



[120] 



CHAPTER III 

THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF 
RECONCILIATION 

Christian thinking on the subject of reconciliation, the 
course of which has just been outlined, was carried on as a 
rule in more or less close contact with the New Testament. 
It did not, indeed, attach itself immediately to the text of 
Scripture, and though the authority of Scripture would have 
been frankly admitted by all the theologians whose names 
have been mentioned, many of their forms of thought — for 
instance, the dominant one of "satisfaction" — come from 
elsewhere. The experiences, however, which really inspired 
all the intellectual activity we have surveyed, owed their 
origin to the gospel, and the great witness to the gospel was 
the New Testament. Moreover, as the experience of recon- 
ciliation was obviously the main characteristic of New Tes- 
tament life, and as it brought with it, just as obviously, not 
only a spiritual but an intellectual regeneration, in which the 
new experience was interpreted by the first Christians to 
themselves, it is natural to ascribe to this primitive inter- 
pretation of the new life a great if not a decisive authority. 
We cannot, of course, simply borrow it to save ourselves the 
trouble of thinking ; it is inconsistent with the nature of intel- 
ligence simply to borrow anything. But we may admit that 
it is entitled to the most serious consideration; and if our 
own interpretation of what we call the experience of recon- 

[121] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

ciliation is inconsistent with it, we must feel that the question 
then raised is whether our interpretation is entitled to be 
called, in any properly historical sense, Christian. 

It would hardly be profitable to discuss abstractly and 
a priori the kind of questions here involved. All we can do 
is to approach the New Testament with candour and to ab- 
sorb what of it we can. There may be things in it which we 
cannot absorb, but which we can let alone without misgiving; 
but it would surely cause the most profound misgiving if 
the thing which is central and vital in the New Testament 
proved to be a thing which in the last resort we could only 
decline. This may not be a very adequate statement of the 
authority of the New Testament for Christian doctrine, but 
it is the actual basis on which most ministers of the New 
Testament at present stand, and it may serve for practical 
purposes — the only purposes which the gospel itself 
serves. 1 

A natural question to many in this connection is, Why 
limit to the New Testament the reference to Scripture*? 
The New Testament writers do not make for themselves — 
or so at least it is often said — any claim to authority ; rather 
do they appeal to the authority of what we call the Old 
Testament. What they preach, even about Jesus, is "accord- 
ing to" these ancient Scriptures. His death for our sins and 
His resurrection on the third day are set with the help of 
the Old Testament in the convincing and divine light which 
makes them authoritative for the conscience, a message of 
reconciliation and of eternal hope (1 Cor. xv. 3 f.). The 

1 On this see the instructive paragraph in Stade's Bibl. Theologie der alten 
Testaments, §§ 2. 5. But it is not merely "der vulgar-protestantische Fehler," 
as Stade calls it, which connects with the idea of religion, in the first instance, 
that of a doctrine (Lehre) ; the mistake is as common and as tenaciously held 
among Romanists as among Protestants. 

[122] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

apostles, it may be said, read the Old Testament as a Chris- 
tian book, and we do not get into their minds till we can do 
the same. Would it not be proper, then, to take up here 
rather the Biblical than the New Testament doctrine of rec- 
onciliation, and to begin with an examination of the Old 
Testament by itself? This is not the view which on reflec- 
tion has commended itself to the writer, and there are weighty 
considerations to be alleged against it. 

It is true, no doubt, that there is a continuity between the 
Old Testament and the New, of which New Testament writ- 
ers are well aware. It is one purpose of God which is being 
fulfilled throughout both, one people of God the story of 
which is being told from Abel to the apostolic age. There 
is one society of which God is the head, and in which God 
and man live in more or less perfect harmony with each 
other, sharing a common life, and achieving common ends. 
The Christian Church is conscious of being the true people 
of God, and as such the heir of all God's promises. The 
difference is that in earlier times the heir was a child, but 
now in the fulness of the time he has attained his majority 
and its liberty. But even where the continuity is insisted 
upon, the great thing is to understand the difference which 
has been made by the coming and the work of Christ; and 
though the apostles may use Old Testament ideas — sacrifice, 
redemption, propitiation, and such like — to interpret Christ 
to themselves, these ideas are all involuntarily modified by 
their application to Him. Instead of going to the Old Testa- 
ment to find what He is in these characters, we have to fasten 
our eyes on Him to see what the essential truth of those Old 
Testament ideas amounts to. It is quite fair to say that we 
do not see Jesus truly unless we see Him in the perspective 
of the Old Testament, but it is quite fair also to say that we 

[123] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

do not see the Old Testament truly unless we see it in the 
perspective of Jesus. To study reconciliation in the Old 
Testament, with our eyes closed to Him, would be to study 
it in vain. Our experience of it is only through Him, and 
the study of what it was, and of how it was conditioned, 
appropriated and realised, at a stage of religious history at 
which He had not yet appeared, and which even in imagina- 
tion we can only doubtfully revive, can hardly be of decisive 
importance for our present pursuit. At all events, the use 
which New Testament writers make of the Old Testament 
can quite conveniently be referred to when the connections 
in which they use it come before us. 

The propriety of this course is more evident if we observe 
that the New Testament is intensely conscious not only of its 
continuity with the Old, but of the fact that it transcends 
the Old. Paul, in particular, often defines the relation be- 
tween them as one of contrast and even antagonism. In their 
spiritual effects, they are precisely opposed to each other; 
the New Testament does what the Old failed to do; it brings 
us to victory where the Old only led us to defeat. The one 
is embodied in the letter and the other in the spirit, and 
while the letter kills, the spirit makes alive. The ministry 
of the one ends in condemnation, that of the other in justifi- 
cation. The one has a transient, the other an abiding glory. 
The last word which the one wrings from human lips is the 
despairing cry, "O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver 
me*?" The first word which the other inspires is, "So then 
there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." 
This does indeed bring us to the point at which Paul is para- 
doxical to the verge of injustice, and perhaps beyond it, in 
his treatment of the Old Testament — expounding its religion, 
as he does for the moment, with the legalist life of the Phar- 

[124] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

isee under the law — but it shows at the same time that in ap- 
proaching what is most characteristic of the gospel only 
through its continuity with the Old Testament, we are not 
necessarily entering on the most promising path. It is just as 
well to plunge at once in medias res. The New Testament 
gospel is related to human nature as well as to Jewish history, 
and much of it can probably be understood without a special 
historical training. Where this latter is indispensable as the 
key to peculiarities in the original construction and presenta- 
tion of the gospel, we can consider as occasion requires. 

To say this does not question the importance of the Old 
Testament nor its peculiar connection with the New. The 
idea of Schleiermacher, that the Christian religion was equally 
related to Gentile as to Jewish antecedents, and that there 
was an equivalent preparation for it in the pagan as in the 
Old Testament history, is quite unhistorical. Neither does 
it imply any assent beforehand to the arguments of those stu- 
dents of comparative religion who would persuade us that 
most of what is most characteristic of the New Testament, 
especially in its doctrine of reconciliation — the whole con- 
ception, for example, of a divine Redeemer, in whose death 
and resurrection men partake by mystical and sacramental 
means — is due to the infiltration into primitive Christian- 
ity of ideas which originated not in the Old Testament, but 
in the Hellenistic mystery religions. These arguments can 
be considered when they come directly before us : their valid- 
ity does not need to be determined before we take the New 
Testament into our hands. On general grounds we can only 
hold that when the key to New Testament doctrines is 
sought anywhere rather than in the Old Testament, the pre- 
sumption is that the search is misdirected. The sounder view 
historically is that nothing has a right to a place in the New 

[125] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Testament which has not antecedents and affinities in the 
Old. 

But in taking the New Testament into our hands, without 
prejudice of any kind, one vital problem arrests us. Is the 
New Testament itself a unity % Does it, to apply the question 
to our special subject, contain one doctrine of reconciliation, 
and no other ? Does every part of it contain such a doctrine? 
There was a time, not so very remote, when these questions 
would not have been asked. The Christian Church of all 
ages and of all confessions believed that the Son of God, by 
His sacrificial death on the cross, had borne the sin of the 
world and reconciled men to God. It believed that by His 
resurrection from the dead men were born again to a living 
hope of eternal life. This was, in short, the gospel message; 
there was no gospel except in the Son of God, who was deliv- 
ered for our offences and raised again for our justification. 
But in the last two generations another view has been widely 
held. The place of Christ in Christianity has been questioned 
and denied. It would not be of so much consequence if 
this were done by way of repudiating Christianity; what 
makes it important is that it purports to be done in the way 
of purifying and reforming Christianity, and that it pro- 
fesses to appeal to the authority of Christ Himself. It had 
its most startling expression in Harnack's well-known saying, 
that in the gospel as preached by Jesus the Son had no place, 
only the Father. Assuming that this was true, there would 
evidently be a schism in the New Testament itself. For in 
the gospel as preached by the apostles after the departure 
of Jesus, the Son is so far from having no place that He fills 
all things. To put it bluntly, in this view there are in the 
New Testament two gospels. There is the gospel preached 
by Jesus and the gospel preached by Paul, and so far as the 

[126] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

place of Jesus is concerned, the two are in direct antithesis 
to each other. In the one, Jesus is the ideal subject of 
religion, the pattern believer, who shows men through all 
the vicissitudes, temptations, wrongs, and agonies of life, 
and even in death itself, how to trust the Father and to love 
His children; in the other, Jesus is, in the first instance, not 
the pattern but the object of faith; we believe in Him as 
Lord and Saviour, as the propitiation for our sins, and not for 
ours only, but for the sin of the whole world. He does not 
merely announce, by His life and death He achieves, the 
reconciliation of men to God. Probably in practice no one 
born and brought up in the Christian Church is able simply 
to accept this antithesis. There is truth in the conception of 
Jesus as the pattern believer; the New Testament presents 
it, and the soul acknowledges its power. But there is truth 
also in the conception of Jesus as the object of faith, a 
redeemer, or reconciler, a sacrifice for sin; the New Testa- 
ment presents this also, and the conscience of the sinner 
cannot shut it out. The impossibility of treating the anti- 
theses as mutually exclusive is apparent even in Harnack 
himself. In the very context of the passage in which he 
declares that the Son has no place in the gospel, but only 
the Father, he is compelled to make a qualification so immense 
that it virtually annuls the declaration. The Son, he repeats, 
does not belong to the gospel as an element of it, but He has 
been "the personal realisation and the power of the gospel, 
and is still perpetually experienced as such. Fire is kindled 
only at fire, and personal life only at personal powers." 1 
The same impossibility of ignoring entirely the value of the 
testimony borne in the New Testament to Christ as redeemer 
and reconciler is conspicuous in a lecture entitled The Two- 

1 Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, 91 f. 

[127] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

fold Gospel in the New Testament, delivered by Harnack at 
the Fifth International Congress of Free Christianity and Re- 
ligious Progress, held at Berlin in 1910. Here he goes so far 
as to say that "this double gospel, as it is set forth in the 
New Testament, is just as necessary at the present day as it 
has been necessary in all periods of the past." 1 

But we can go much further than this. In his work Jesus 
and the Gospel, first published in 1908, the writer gave what 
he considers a sufficient proof of the unity of the New Testa- 
ment. The argument is that there are not two gospels in the 
New Testament, but one; and that that one gospel is sup- 
ported not only by the apostolic writers, but by the witness of 
Jesus Himself. It demonstrates, as he believes, that the atti- 
tude to Christ which has always been maintained in the 
Church — that in which He is regarded as the object of faith, 
the redeemer of men from sin and their reconciler to God 
through His death on the cross — is the one which is character- 
istic of the New Testament from beginning to end, and that 
this attitude is the only one which is consistent with the self- 
revelation of Jesus during His life on earth. If Jesus did 
not claim, He won and accepted this relation of men to Him- 
self. It is impossible to resume this argument here, but its 
conclusions will be taken for granted. That there are rela- 
tive contrasts within the New Testament is not denied, but 
there are no absolute ones — that is, there are none such as 
would justify us in speaking of two gosepls. It is more nat- 
ural, for example, that our Lord should magnify the freeness 
of God's love to the sinful, and more natural that the sinners 
to whom it came should magnify its cost, as coming through 
Him and through His passion; and this, in fact, is what 

1 The Two-fold Gospel in the New Testament, a lecture by Adolf Har- 
nack, D.D. (Williams and Norgate). 

[128] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

we find. But though there is a contrast between freeness 
and cost, there is no antagonism, and neither is there any 
antagonism between the gospel of Jesus and that of Paul, 
or Peter, or John. We get a better chance of being impressed 
with the truth in its native proportions if we approach the 
evangelists and apostles without such questionable precon- 
ceptions. 

There is, however, at this point another difficulty on which 
the historical study of the New Testament has laid great 
weight, the difficulty of realising how historical events, like 
the life and death of Jesus, should have the significance 
which the New Testament and all Christian faith assign 
them. That something occurring in time and now lying in 
time far behind us should reveal eternal truth and have eter- 
nal value — that what was unquestionably human should be 
indubitably divine — that history, which is essentially relative, 
should here only be transcended, should for this once have 
absolute significance, never to be transcended — that the death 
of Christ should be at the same time the consummation of 
human sin and the final revelation of the love of God, a cruel 
unscrupulous murder and a voluntary atoning sacrifice; that 
it should be possible to explain the same thing in such in- 
conceivably remote ways — on the one hand, through its his- 
torical causes in the ignorance, the pride, the hatred, the self- 
righteousness of men; on the other, through its final cause 
in the eternal sin-bearing, redeeming love of God;— there is 
the one difficulty of the Christian religion in which all others 
are summed up. How can the historical and human be eter- 
nal and divine? The New Testament, curiously enough, 
is aware of the contrasts here stated, but does not seem per- 
plexed by them. The story of the Passion is told quite ob- 
jectively — the timidity of the twelve, the malice of the 

[129] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

priests, the treachery of Judas, the vacillation and unscrupu- 
lousness of Pilate, all the historical causes of the death of 
Jesus, are presented quite disinterestedly; and side by side 
with this it is asserted that God gave Him up for us all, and 
forgiveness of sins is preached in His name. There was 
probably a latent sense of the disproportion between the 
historical facts and the divine meaning of them, but faith 
rather gloried in the paradox than wrestled with it. That 
a judicial murder, attended by many circumstances of squalor 
and horror, should also be the final sacrifice for the sin of 
the world, was strange indeed; but it was the Lord's doing, 
and wonderful in believers' eyes. No doubt the apostles 
were aware that in all its inner reality, in everything in it in 
which Christ was revealed, the passion was divine. When 
He said to the women on the Via Dolorosa, "Weep not for 
me, but weep for yourselves and for your children"; when 
He prayed at the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know 
not what they do"; when He said to the penitent thief, "To- 
day shalt thou be with me in paradise"; when He bowed 
His head and cried, "Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit," they felt that nothing of this was without God. It 
was through eternal spirit — a spirit which in moral power 
could never be outgrown, and in which the final reality of 
God was made manifest — that He offered Himself without 
spot to the Father. But they do not reason upon this, they 
seem rather to have had an instinctive sense of its truth. 
The assertion that the murdered Jesus is the Lamb of God 
who takes away the sin of the world is too great not to be 
true, and the verification of it has been too wonderful to 
let us suppose it false. In the New Testament presentation 
of the gospel the final cause of Christ's death — what God 
does in it — completely overshadows the antecedent or his- 

[130] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

torical causes by which it was produced, and here it is the 
New Testament point of view which must determine our 
course. 1 At the same time, while we recognise that the his- 
torical in the New Testament is eternal and divine, we must 
not allow ourselves to suppose that when we have appre- 
hended the eternal and divine we can become indifferent to 
the historical and let it go. The whole power of Christian- 
ity is in its historical character, and to replace its sublime and 
tragic facts by a system of ideas, however true and imposing, 
is to destroy it altogether. 

In the first chapter reference has been made to the general 
character of the work of Jesus. In the widest sense it will 
not be questioned that it was a work of reconciliation. He 
received sinners. He declared, bestowed, and embodied for- 
giveness. He came to seek and to save that which was lost. 
Whatever else He did, He came to men who were alienated 
from God by their sins, full of apprehensions and distrust, 
and He brought them back to God and to the assurance of 
His fatherly love. This was the general character and result 
of His life work in relation to individuals. It was what 
His personality and His teaching inspired in the paralytic 

1 Cf . Grotius, Defensio Fidei Catholicae, etc., ed. secunda, p. 19: "Apostoli 
cum passionem Christi ad usus nostros referunt, non in ea respiciunt hominum 
facta, sed factum ipsius Dei." For another illustration of the disproportion 
between faith and fact in the New Testament, compare the following from 
Dr. Moffatt's note (Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. v.) on Rev. i. 18: 
"When one remembers the actual position of affairs, the confident faith of 
such passages is seen to have been little short of magnificent. To this 
Christian prophet, spokesman of a mere ripple upon a single wave of dissent 
in the broad ocean of paganism, history and experience find unity and 
meaning nowhere but in the person of a blameless Galilean peasant, who 
had perished as a criminal in Jerusalem. So would such early Christian 
expectations appear to an outsider." To understand the New Testament, 
and especially the wonderfulness of it, nothing is more important than to be 
alive to the stupendous contrast in it between appearance and reality, sense 
and faith, the visible and the divine. 

[131] 



t THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

man (of Mark ii.) and in the sin-burdened woman (of Luke 
vii.). The power which inspired the penitence and faith 
which these narratives reveal was exerted through His per- 
sonality, during His ministry; and ever since, it has been 
signally exerted through His Passion. We may say that the 
reconciling virtue of His being was concentrated in His death, 
or that the reconciling virtue of His death pervaded His 
being; in any case, that the whole influence exerted upon 
sinners by Jesus is an influence by which, through penitence 
and faith, they are won from sin to God — in other words, 
is a reconciling influence — cannot be denied. How He exer- 
cised such an influence, and what it cost Him to do so, are 
ulterior questions. 

When Jesus taught about forgiveness, what He emphasised 
was its freeness. This is the lesson of the prodigal son. The 
son did not buy his forgiveness, nor did anybody buy it for 
him. Nothing he could do could ever repay it. His father 
forgave him because he was his father and loved him with 
an indefeasible love, more strong and wonderful than all his 
sins. If there is any argument implied, it is the a fortiori 
argument from man to God which is habitual with Jesus. 
"If you, who are evil, can show such pardoning love to your 
children, much more will your heavenly Father freely forgive 
those who turn from their sins to Him." We have the same 
moral in the parable of the two debtors (Luke vii. 41 f.). 
"When they had nothing to pay, the creditor frankly forgave 
them both" ; exapto-aro, he made them a present of the debt. 
But to emphasise the freeness of forgiveness is not to deny 
that it has other characteristics. It is not unconditional. 
God does not forgive the impenitent, who do not wish nor 
ask to be forgiven. He cannot do so, for forgiveness, like all 
spiritual things, cannot be given unless it is taken, and it 

[132] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

can only be taken by a penitent and surrendered soul. 
Neither, as has been observed above, is the freeness of forgive- 
ness inconsistent with its cost. Those to whom the assurance 
of forgiveness came through Jesus were not unconscious that 
it cost Him something. It came in a way which made them 
feel that they were His debtors, that He had put them under 
an infinite obligation, that they owed Him what they could 
never repay. It was not for Him to say this — that would 
have been morally unbecoming — but it was for them to feel 
it, and when the New Testament Church came to clear con- 
sciousness of itself and of its debt, it expressed its feeling in 
the doxologies to Christ, which from the beginning have 
been its truest creed. "Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed 
us from our sins in His blood, be the glory and the dominion 
for ever and ever." 

The analogy, to which our Lord so often refers, between 
God's forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of one another, 
is very instructive in this connection. "Forgive us our debts," 
He taught His disciples to pray, "as we forgive our debtors." 
It is assumed here that we do forgive our debtors. Such a 
thing as forgiveness is actually known among men, and it 
throws real light upon the forgiveness of God. Here the 
mere fact is important, for we know how deep-seated is the 
impression that forgiveness is impossible. "Things are what 
they are, and the consequences of them will be what they 
will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?" To 
do wrong is to do what cannot be made right; it is to im- 
pair relations of trust and love which can never be the same 
again; its only end is despair. This is what we are apt to 
think and to feel, but the fact that we forgive each other 
is a practical refutation of this desponding logic. The father 
who forgives an erring son, and takes him into his confidence 

[133] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

again — the wife who forgives the husband who has been 
disloyal to her, and makes possible again a common life 
in which there are no secrets — the friend who has been in- 
jured, and yet sees in him who has done the injury some- 
thing quite inconsistent with it, and for the sake of that 
something cannot renounce the offender — all these show that 
there is something in the world higher than the formal obliga- 
tions we owe to each other — higher, it may be said, than 
law or wrong — something which comes into the field to deal 
with emergencies to which law is unequal, and which deals 
with them effectively. And that something is the love which 
forgives and which reconstitutes the personal relations wrong 
had impaired. Here we may confidently argue on our Lord's 
favourite line: If we who are evil know how to deal with 
wrong so as to rob it of enduring power and to restore in 
love the bonds it has broken — if we who are so weak, and 
who live in the world of nature and its iron necessities, can 
give and receive the blessed experience of reconciliation with 
its incalculable power to neutralise and transcend the past 
— much more must the Father, the Lord of heaven and earth, 
be able to forgive sins and restore souls. When we see the 
children forgiving one another their trespasses, we can 
look up securely and say, "There is forgiveness with 
Thee." 

There is another part of our Lord's teaching in connection 
with human forgiveness which is of great consequence, and 
which also throws light on the forgiveness of God. It is the 
duty of the offended person, of him who is in the right, to 
pave the way for reconciliation. He is not, because he is in 
the right, to wait passively and nurse his grievance till the 
offender comes and confesses that he is in the wrong. "If 
thy brother trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault; if 

[134] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother" (Matt, xviii. 
15 f.). Do not be discouraged by one rebuff. Bring every 
moral power at your disposal to bear upon him before you 
leave him to himself. Spare no pains to evoke in him the 
penitence on which forgiveness can be bestowed. This is a 
vital point in the teaching of Jesus about forgiveness between 
man and man : the initiative in the work of reconciliation must 
be taken by him who has been wronged, and he must not 
grudge any self-humbling that is necessary to win the offend- 
ing brother. As has been already indicated, there would have 
been a want of moral decorum had Jesus obtruded the fact 
that this was what God was doing, and doing through Him, 
In point of fact, He did not obtrude it. The father, in the 
parable of the prodigal son, takes no initiative; he does 
nothing to inspire the prodigal with repentance; there is no 
elder brother in the family to go into the far country and 
make the prodigal's case his own, while he appeals to him in 
the name of the father and his love. But though all this is 
not put into the parable, it must all in some way be present 
in the facts, unless the reconciling love of God is a poorer 
thing than the reconciling love which Jesus requires of men. 
But He never requires anything that He does not exhibit, 
and that seeking love, which takes the initiative and is willing 
to spend and to be spent to the uttermost in the work of re- 
conciliation, is the breath of His being. Of course it was not 
for Him to say this, but it was for sinners to see and to feel 
it. It is the plain truth that every one who knows, even in 
human relations, what it is to forgive or to be forgiven, knows 
also that it is the most costly and tragic of all experiences. 
Hence we are not afraid to argue again on our Lord's lines, 
especially when supported by His command to take the first 
steps to reconciliation, and to stop at no cost: "If we being 

[135] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

evil pay the price we do pay to renew the relations wrong 
has broken, how much more will our heavenly Father be 
at cost to reconcile His offending children to Himself ! How 
dearly bought must be that great forgiveness which is the 
highest achievement of the love which bears the sin of the 
world !" The divine forgiveness cannot be easier or cheaper 
than that which we know among ourselves, and it is not alien 
to it. It is of the same nature, but in cost as in worth it 
is above it as the heavens are higher than the earth. If we 
keep this in mind, we shall feel the ineptitude of disputing 
the ascription to Jesus of the words in which He speaks of 
giving His life a ransom for many, or of the cup at the supper 
as a new covenant in His blood. It became Him, who came 
to seek and to save that which was lost, and to take the 
initiative in the work of reconciliation, even at the cost of His 
own life, not indeed to parade His sacrifice, but in moving and 
mysterious words like these, on solemn occasions, to reveal or 
betray its presence in His soul. The fact and its repression 
and its manifestation are all in moral harmony with each 
other. 

There is yet another aspect of human forgiveness to which 
our Lord directs attention, and here also we may point out 
the analogy between it and the forgiveness of God. It is 
fully and impressively exhibited in the parable of the un- 
forgiving servant in Matt, xviii. 23 ff. Jesus teaches here 
that the experience of being forgiven, even when it is only 
one human being who forgives another, is or ought to be 
the most powerful of all motives in the life of the forgiven. 
It ought to bring into his very soul, to lodge at the heart of 
his being, the spirit of him from whom the forgiveness comes. 
This is what we normally find in our relations to one another. 
Nothing as a matter of fact strikes so deep into the human 

[136] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

heart, nothing evokes penitence so tender, so humble, and 
so unreserved, nothing carries with it such joy and such sor- 
row, in a word such inspiring and regenerating power. There 
is no such thing known to human experience as a dead, inert, 
fruitless forgiveness. If there is such a thing it is a moral 
monstrosity; it is not a real case of forgiveness, and does not 
deserve the name. And once more we may use the familiar 
analog}- : "If we who are evil forgive with a forgiveness which 
regenerates — if the reconciliation with which we reconcile our 
offending brother makes him a new creature, with a new sense 
of loyalty to the relations in which we stand to each other — 
much more will the forgiveness of God bring with it the prom- 
ise and potency of a new life." The only forgiveness Jesus 
recognises is that which makes the forgiven heart the home 
of the love which forgives; in other words, that by which a 
man is born again the child of God. Hence, forgiveness or 
reconciliation is in a strict sense everything in the Christian 
religion. It does not need to be eked out with anything else. 
God trusts to it to keep the sinner right with Him, just as we 
ourselves trust when we forgive. The child whom his father 
or mother pardons through pain cannot but be good while 
the sense of this forgiveness rests upon his heart, and it is this 
simple principle on which the whole New Testament rests. 
True forgiveness regenerates. Justification is the power which 
sanctifies. This truth, which we can verify in our forgiveness 
of one another daily, is the ultimate and fundamental truth 
of the gospel. The ignoring of it has led not only to unhappy 
practical consequences, to which the New Testament itself 
bears witness, but to many artificialities and confusions in 
theology. It has led to such sayings as that "all forgiveness 
is of the nature of fiction," 1 or even that forgiveness is 

1 Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 94. 

[137] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

a sort of formality. This may be in part a question of words ; 
forgiveness by those who so speak is being taken in an ab- 
stractness foreign to its nature. But in a term so important, 
the more closely we can keep to the concrete reality and all its 
inevitable implications the better. 

If we turn from the teaching of Jesus on forgiveness as 
between man and man and on the divine forgiveness as 
illustrated by it, to His conception of His own work as a 
whole, we get further light upon our subject. The vocation 
of Jesus is represented in the gospels in two ways. On the 
one hand, He came to reveal the Father, and by doing so 
to enable men to become children of God. In this relation 
He is spoken of simpliciter as the Son, to whom alone all 
others must owe it that they have the knowledge of the 
Father and a place among the children (Matt. xi. 27 ff.). On 
the other hand, He came to bring in the Kingdom of God 
and to secure for men their citizenship in this divine common- 
wealth. In this relation He is spoken of as the Son of Man. 
No expressions in the New Testament have been more dis- 
cussed than Son of Man and Kingdom of God, but it is not 
necessary here to enter into any of the controversies connected 
with them. It will hardly be denied that the coming of the 
Son of Man in His glory, and the coming or consummation 
of the Kingdom, are coincident if not identical. Nor is it 
possible to contest the connection between the Son of Man 
in many gospel passages and the description of one like unto 
a Son of Man in Daniel vii., who comes before the Ancient 
of days, and has dominion, glory, and a kingdom given to 
Him. But there is one great and vital difference. The 
human form in the book of Daniel is nothing but glorious; 
in the gospels, the Son of Man is the subject of predictions 
in which Jesus declares not only His final glory but the path 

[138] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

of rejection and treachery, of suffering and of death, which 
precedes and leads up to it. Whenever He speaks of these 
sufferings, as He does again and again, they are the suffer- 
ings of the Son of Man. To speak of them thus is to bring 
them into His vocation, and to represent them as essential 
to the coming of the Kingdom of God. Not apart from them, 
not in spite of them, but in virtue of them, does He establish 
that kingdom in which God rules over a community of for- 
given and reconciled men. 1 The Son of Man (in short), in the 
teaching of Jesus, fuses in one person the glorious figure of 
Daniel, and perhaps of the later book of Enoch, with the 
suffering servant of the Lord depicted in Isaiah xlii., xlix., 
liii. This fusion pervades the story of the gospels more than 
is sometimes noticed. It comes out at the very beginning 
of the ministry of Jesus in the account of His baptism. The 
heavenly voice speaks to Him in the words not only of Ps. ii. 
7, but of Isaiah xlii. l ; showing that from the very hour when 
He entered on His work as Saviour He was identified in His 
own mind with the suffering servant, and realised that in 
His calling to bring in the Kingdom of God a career like that 
of the servant was inevitable. The connection is made in- 
disputable, when in the last hours of His life He applies to 
Himself the words of Isaiah liii. 12: I tell you, this that 
stands written must be fulfilled in me. He was reckoned 
with transgressors." And in the most wonderful of all the 
words in which He declares His consciousness of what He 
is here to do, the references to Isaiah liii. are numerous and 
undoubted: "The Son of Man came not to be ministered 
unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for 
many." 2 

1 See the author's Death of Christ, 19 ff. 
a The Death of Christ, p. 33, note. 

[139] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

It is the carrying on of kindred thoughts which we find in 
the Last Supper, though there they are attached to other 
passages in the Old Testament. Jesus speaks with His death 
in immediate prospect, and He calls His blood covenant 
blood. In the words as we have them in the different New 
Testament writers, there may be here or there a point at 
which the meaning is brought out more articulately than it 
was in the very terms employed by Jesus. But though it 
is possible that this is so, it is by no means certain. He 
may very well have said a great deal more — indeed it is 
difficult to believe that He did not say more — on the subject 
pointed to in the monumental words of institution. If He 
called His blood covenant blood at all, and no one questions 
this, it must have been the blood of a new covenant, and 
there is no reason why in conversation He should not have 
used the word new Himself. And if the word were used, 
or the idea of a new covenant suggested at all, it is incon- 
ceivable that any mind, nourished as was His on the Old 
Testament scriptures, should have failed to recall that sub- 
limest of ancient prophecies in which Jeremiah describes the 
new covenant as it dawned on his horizon, with its primary 
and fundamental blessing of the forgiveness of sins (Jer. 
xxxi. 31-34). Possibly Jesus did not expressly say, as He 
is represented doing in Matt. xxvi. 28, that His blood was 
shed for many unto remission of sins, but possibly also He 
did use those very words. Even if He did not, there is 
no reason to believe that Matthew misinterpreted Him in 
using them. Expressions like "covenant blood," which was 
of course sacrificial blood, had their meaning in a system of 
ideas which was present to the minds of those to whom Jesus 
spoke, and immediate inferences from them were possible for 
such hearers which would not at once suggest themselves 

[140] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

to us. It is at most such an immediate inference which is 
drawn by the first evangelist when he makes the death of 
Jesus refer to the forgiveness of sins, and it is gratuitous to 
question its correctness. He had Jeremiah at least to prompt 
him, and the whole of the New Testament supports him. 
If it were a case of calculating chances, the chances would 
be a thousand to one that Matthew was right in his render- 
ing of the mind of Jesus, and that those who dissent from 
him at a distance of two thousand years are wrong. Hence 
when we take into account our Lord's conception of His work 
as a whole, and especially His conception of a Son of Man 
who comes to His kingdom through a Passion interpreted 
in such wonderful words as Mark x. 45 and Matt. xxvi. 28, 
we are able to say, with His authority behind us, that this 
Passion entered into the work of redeeming men, of for- 
giving them, and of reconciling them to God. Certainly we 
have no formal theology here, nothing abstract or specula- 
tive; but we have the consciousness, on the part of Jesus — 
the recognition, it may be said, in His words — of all the 
realities which present evangelical theology with its task. 
The problem of a doctrine of reconciliation has been set. 

When we pass beyond the words of Jesus, the great preacher 
of reconciliation is Paul. The term owes its currency in 
the Church to him. It is he who describes what it is to be a 
Christian in the words, "we have received the reconciliation" 
(Rom. v. 10). It is he who says, "All things are of God, 
who reconciled us to himself through Christ." The apostolic 
ministry is for him "the ministry of reconciliation"; the 
apostolic gospel is "the word of reconciliation"; its appeal 
is condensed in the cry, "Be reconciled to God" (2 Cor. v. 
18-20). The reconciliation is essentially related to the Pas- 
sion. "He has made peace by the blood of his cross." "You 

[hi] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

who were once alienated and enemies in mind in your evil 
works, he has now reconciled in the body of his flesh through 
death" (Col. i. 20-22). Though he only uses the term in 
c. v. 10 f. (xi. 15), it is in the epistle to the Romans that 
Paul offers us the most systematic presentation of his gospel, 
and it is on it mainly that this statement of what he under- 
stands by reconciliation will be based. 

Paul connects in the closest possible way the announce- 
ment of his gospel and the announcement of the necessity 
which it has to meet. "I am not ashamed of the gospel, 
for in it the righteousness of God is revealed ... for the 
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodli- 
ness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in 
unrighteousness" (Rom. i. 16-18). The revelation of God's 
righteousness — which is the method of reconciliation — is 
necessitated by the revelation of His wrath; we require 
the gospel because apart from it this is what awaits us. It 
ought to be noticed that both the righteousness of God which 
constitutes the gospel, and the wrath of God to which men 
are exposed apart from the gospel, are spoken of as revelations. 
God is behind both and present in both. Both have a divine 
reality and objectivity. It is because the wrath of God is 
divinely real that those who are exposed to it need to have a 
real divine righteousness; while the divine righteousness 
must have such a character as to meet the situation created 
by the divine wrath. The bare statement of these facts at 
once raises the problem of Pauline and indeed of all New 
Testament theology. When God for man's salvation reveals a 
divine righteousness which somehow confronts and neutralises 
a divine wrath, we can only conceive it as God taking part 
with us against Himself. It is a divine wrath which makes 
the ducaioevvr) Oeov necessary; it is a prior manifestation 

[142] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

of God's own nature by relation to which the SiKaioavvq Qeov 
has to be defined. When we try to put this into an abstract 
doctrinal statement it is not easy to escape at least the 
appearance of contradiction; perhaps it is not possible. But 
we must be true to the facts, and in interpreting Paul we 
must be true to the connection of ideas in his primary state- 
ment of his gospel. It is often said that the way to avoid 
these perplexing contradictions is to recognise that the work 
of reconciliation, the atonement, the binaioavvn Qeov, or 
however we phrase it, does not need to be defined by relation 
to God or to anything divine whatever: it is exhausted in 
man, and in the effect it produces in him. In other words, 
an objective doctrine of what Christ does — a doctrine imply- 
ing that it is determined by anything divine — is a mistake: 
all we need is a doctrine of the way in which it tells upon 
sinners. That it must tell upon sinners is of course admitted 
by everybody, but to limit it so is certainly not in agreement 
with Paul. For him, it is not merely something in us that 
necessitates the revelation of divine righteousness, and deter- 
mines it to take place in one way and not in another; it 
is something in God; it is the divine wrath revealed against 
every kind of sin. It is tempting when we preach the gospel 
to try to classify and simplify it so that every appearance 
even of contradiction shall disappear. .But there is a real 
danger that in doing so we lose contact with the facts from 
which Paul started, and which have at least the semblance 
of contradiction; and when we lose contact with the facts 
we lose the power to evangelise. In spite of crudities and 
contradictions, men feel the power of the gospel through the 
most inadequate statement which implies that somehow or 
other it has to do with the wrath of God, as they do not feel 
it through the most lucid statement which defines it only 

[H3] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

by relation to the effect it is intended to produce in us. It 
is worth while therefore, for practical as well as scientific 
reasons, to direct attention to this point. 

Nothing is commoner than the denial that the revelation 
of divine wrath is real. The wrath of God, it is constantly 
asserted, is an idea which is ultimately inconsistent with the 
Christian conception of God as a loving father. It is an 
illusion, a misunderstanding, the natural mistake of a bad 
conscience; and, like other mistakes, it is removed by explana- 
tion. Sin, against which it is supposed to be the divine re- 
action, has no such reality for God as this terrible word im- 
plies. It does not create a problem for Him the solution of 
which is costly and awful. The wrath of God, in short, is not 
a revelation but a bugbear. Well, this is a question of fact. 
Paul nowhere gives a definition of sin, or of the way in which 
it is related to the wrath of God, but he says this wrath is 
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteous- 
ness of men; that is, it comes into human experience as a 
divine reality about which he, at least, has no uncertainty. 
It is revealed, as he explains in the first chapter of Romans, 
in the appalling spectacles of moral degradation which 
the world presents, and in which we see human sin, under 
the retributive judgment of God, exerting the most 
tremendous sentences upon itself. Three times over, in 
VV. 24, 26, 28, he says Trapkduicev avrovs 6 Oeos — God gave 
them up, judicially abandoned them. He gave them up to 
uncleanness, to shameful passions, to a reprobate mind, 
meaning by the last a state of intelligence and conscience in 
which man's moral nature could only be rejected by Him 
because it no longer did the work it was meant for, but had 
been perverted against itself and its Author. Under God's 
judgment, the very light that was in men had become dark- 

[144] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

ness. Was there no divine wrath in this*? Paul believed 
in God as a living, acting, personal God, and while he prob- 
ably would not have quarrelled with the expression that 
the degradation he describes was the natural and inevitable 
consequence of unfaithfulness to God, he would not have 
felt that it was any easier or truer to say this than to say, 
"Therefore God gave them up." We may take too easily to 
the conception of natural law in the spiritual world, or, in a 
case like this, to that of inevitable moral consequences. 
Sinful nature inclines unconsciously to everything which keeps 
God at arm's length. Many people, Erskine of Linlathen 
said, use their religion as a shield against God; many more 
in modern times use a conception like that of the moral order 
of the world as such a shield. There is a system of things, a 
method in which they operate, spontaneously and inevitably, 
to moral issues, but we do it wrong (it is said) when we intro- 
duce into it the personal voluntary action of God, especially 
with such associations as are inseparable from a term like 
wrath. But if there is a God at all, a living, personal God, 
the wrong, upon reflection, may well seem to be the other 
way. There is nothing good in the world but a good will, 
and nothing bad but a bad will; there is nothing moral at 
all except by the exercise of will. Moral consequences are 
consequences determined by a moral will, whatever the 
means employed to work them out, and we cannot hide from 
the will of God behind the very means which He is employing 
to express His will. It is not an impersonal characterless 
result when what we call the inevitable moral consequences 
of any line of conduct are brought home to a man ; it is not 
a result at all, in the proper sense of the term, but the carry- 
ing out of a sentence; the proper way to describe it is by a 
proposition in which the living God is subject. This is what 

[145] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Paul does here. He does not look at the moral world as 
something which he can always keep with its quasi-physical 
necessities between himself and God; the moral world is the 
very sphere and scene of God's working. The appalling 
fact with which we have to deal is that God has delivered 
men up to the awful degradation which we see, and in doing 
so has made a revelation of His wrath. 

Further, this wrath is revealed in the solemn witness of 
conscience that they who do such things are worthy of death 
(Rom. i. 32) : they have no right to be, and the final sen- 
tence will in due time be executed on them. This is what 
Paul means when he says that the wages of sin is death. 
This is not mythology, nor pseudo-science ; it is the testimony 
of conscience that all sin, and all who identify themselves 
with sin, must confront the annihilating judgment of God. 
And finally, the wrath of God is revealed particularly in that 
commonplace of religion which to every one trained like Paul 
is self-evidently true — namely, that at the consummation of 
history God will judge the world and inflict the wrath which 
sin has merited (Rom. iii. 5). As the argument of iii. 5 shows, 
a person who does not admit this is a person with whom the 
apostle cannot argue for lack of fundamental common prem- 
ises. It is mainly, if not always, in this eschatological sense 
that the wrath of God is spoken of in Paul. 1 It is the wrath to 
come. x Jesus is our deliverer from the coming wrath ( 1 Thess. 
i. 10). We shall be saved from the wrath through Him 
(Rom. v. 10). And we must not say that this eschatological 
wrath is unreal, a picture painted on the clouds by an over- 
heated imagination. If it is seen on the clouds, it is projected 
on them from the conscience, and the lurid colours are derived 
not from blank fear but from conscience itself, and from the 

1 See Haupt's note (in Meyer's Kommentar) on Col. iii. 6. 

[146] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

terrible experiences already referred to. When we take all 
these things together, it is idle to speak of the wrath of God as 
unreal. It is as real as any revelation of what God is, or of 
how He is affected in relation to man. Nothing that treats 
it as unreal can have any relevance as gospel to the situa- 
tion of sinners. 

This, though he gives no formal definition of sin, is the 
premiss of Paul's gospel of reconciliation. The two things 
in which he is mainly interested, so far as sin is concerned, 
are its universality, and the hopelessness of the problem it 
presents to man. Before he proceeds to explain how recon- 
ciliation is achieved by Christ, he exhibits to us the whole 
world guilty before God (vit65(,kos t<$ Gey, Rom. iii. 19: 
subject to His judgment and His wrath, lying under a 
terrible responsibility to Him). But his notion of sin is 
far more deeply tinctured by experience than the bare 
idea of universality suggests. Its universality is not more 
present to him than its virulence. This last is what is 
specially conveyed by his peculiar use of the term "flesh." 
He speaks of the flesh as flesh of sin (Rom. viii. 3) : the 
two are or have become so related that the flesh is con- 
ceived as characterised by or belonging to sin. He says in 
c. vii. 16, "in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing." 
He says in c. vii. 8, "they that are in the flesh cannot please 
God." In Gal. v. 17, he tells us that "the flesh lusteth against 
the spirit," and in v. 24 that "they that are Christ's have 
crucified the flesh." Our first thought of this singular mode 
of expression is that it is only too effective for its purpose. 
If man is flesh, and if flesh is the seat and source of evil, then 
evil is native to man ; it belongs to the physical and not to the 
moral world, and our conception of it as sin is illegitimate. 
It is certain, however, that this is not in line with Paul's 

[147] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

use of the term, but the very reverse. What the flesh stands 
for with him is not in the first instance the universality of 
sin, though that is included; it is its virulence, its ingrained, 
deep-seated, constitutional character. If it were compared 
to a disease, it would not be a disease which had been acci- 
dentally caught and could be easily shaken off by a naturally 
healthy constitution; it would be a deep-seated congenital 
malady, against which the constitution had no resources 
within itself, and which could only have a fatal end. Not 
very much has been made by attempts to explain Paul's way 
of speaking about the flesh, either by reference to the Old 
Testament or to the dualism, metaphysical or ethical, in 
Greek philosophy. If there is any truth in his thought at 
all, it has no doubt antecedents and affinities in both — for 
men everywhere acquire self-knowledge — but these are not 
the key to his language. At this point nothing in Paul is 
speculative or second-hand. All he says is based on experi- 
ence. All the passion of which his nature is capable comes 
out when he speaks of the flesh — a passionate loathing and 
repulsion, a passionate sense of bondage, a passion of ignominy 
and despair. He did not learn these things nor how to speak 
of them from any one, either in the Old Testament or in the 
philosophic world: he learned them within. "O wretched 
man that I am ! who shall deliver me?" "I know that in me, 
that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing." The flesh, in 
the sense suggested by these expressions, is a synonym for 
human nature as it exists in this world. It does not describe 
only what we should call carnal sins; indeed, in the appalling 
picture of sensual degradation in Romans i. the term flesh is 
never used. But it does describe human nature as it is, 
and the man who has not in himself the key to Paul's doctrine 
is a man who does not know himself. "The flesh" may have 

[i 4 8] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

a physical basis or relation, but it exists for Paul only in his 
moral consciousness. It does not ocur to him that when 
sin is thus closely connected with nature it loses the proper 
character of sinfulness; its sinfulness is assumed all along, 
and the sense of its close connection with nature does not 
make it less sinful but more dreadful and hopeless. It would 
not have seemed real to Paul to say that a man is not respon- 
sible for his nature: what else has he to be responsible for? 
We are all responsible for ourselves, and when Paul uses the 
word flesh in this connection, it is not to deny or to minimise 
our responsibility, but to make us feel how deep, all-pervading 
and desperate it is. The reality of sin and the reality of our 
responsibility for it, as that which evokes the condemnation 
and wrath of God and leaves us exposed to them, "condemned 
and unsheltered men," is the presupposition of Paul's gospel 
of reconciliation. The gospel does not deny these terrible 
realities; it confronts them and deals with them as what 
they are. 

In the Epistle to the Romans Paul condenses his gospel, in 
this relation, in the brief phrase biKavoavvq Qeov, the, or a, 
righteousness of God. This is what is wanted to match and 
overmatch the situation in which man stands subject to 
God's condemnation and to the dpyrj Oeov, the wrath of God, 
in which that condemnation ultimately takes effect. Where 
Paul first uses the expression, condensed as it is in itself to the 
point of being enigmatic, he gives no explanation of it (Rom. 
i. 17), only introducing its relation to faith; but at a later 
stage (chap. iii. 21-26), he defines his thought with some pre- 
cision. On one point there is no question. However the 
divine righteousness be conceived, it is on the basis of it, 
and through its appropriation to them on the ground of 
faith, that sinners are reconciled to God. It is in fact an 

[149] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

outward or objective reconciliation, and in the believing 
acceptance of it (c. v. 10) men respond to the gospel call, 
"Be ye reconciled to God" (2 Cor. v. 20), and enter upon a 
reconciled or justified life. 

At the present moment, the most current way of interpret- 
ing the divine righteousness is that which regards it as the 
righteousness of God Himself, His essential nature or char- 
acter. Men are bankrupt of righteousness, they have none 
of their own, but the universe is not bankrupt. There is 
righteousness with God, inexhaustible and overflowing, and 
this is the sinner's hope. This has not been understood by 
the world, but it is the truth, and the truth revealed and 
proclaimed in the gospel. The divine righteousness is like 
a sun which shines on and on, pouring its radiance into lives 
darkened by sin, and making them bright. It is like a 
perennial spring of pure water flowing ceaselessly into a 
muddy basin and gradually washing it out and making it 
clean. Men are reconciled to God when they are made 
holy as He is holy, righteous as He is righteous, and when 
it is divested of technicalities and reduced to its simplest 
terms, this is the process. 

. No one can have any interest in disputing the truth there 
is in such a statement. There is none good but one, that is, 
God, and for all goodness all men are always indebted to 
Him. But it does not follow that this is what Paul meant 
by the divine righteousness which he preached as gospel to 
sinners. Paul was dealing with a moral problem, with the 
position of sinners against whom there had been and was a 
revelation of wrath, and the problem cannot be stated, to 
say nothing of being solved, as long as we confine ourselves 
to the use of physical categories such as those implied in 
the illustrations of the sun and the spring. Neither do we 

[150] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

come closer to his thought when we speak of the binaioavvt) 
Oelv as the righteousness of God, "not as inherent in the 
Divine Essence, but as going forth and embracing the per- 
sonalities of men. It is righteousness active and energising; 
the righteousness of the Divine Will as it were projected and 
enclosing and gathering into itself human wills." That this 
is the character of God's righteousness need not be disputed : 
we can say quite freely that "the whole scheme of things 
by which He gathers to Himself a righteous people is the 
direct and spontaneous expression of His own inherent 
righteousness : a necessity of His own nature impels Him to 
make them like Himself." * But to reduce the gospel to this 
is to ignore the distinction between man simpliciter and sinful 
man; it is to assume that sin makes no difference to God, 
or to the mode in which He makes men partakers in His 
righteousness. It is remarkable that such explanations of 
the righteousness of God can be given quite fully without 
introducing the name of Jesus. Room may be made for 
Him, no doubt, in the system of ideas which they exhibit; 
but at the utmost He is a shining illustration of the nature 
of the divine righteousness — it is in no way dependent on 
Him. But this is not the point of view of Paul. In Paul 
the divine righteousness which constitutes gospel for sinners 
exposed to the divine wrath is revealed in Christ, and nowhere 
else. It is not a vast idea which he possesses independently, 
and under which Christ can be conveniently subsumed; 
apart from Christ, and Christ crucified, he has no idea of a 
divine righteousness at all which he can preach to sinners 
as the way of reconciliation to God. 

If it is possible to overlook this when we read the words 
in Rom. i. 16, it should not be possible when we come to deal 

1 Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 25. 

[151] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

with the apostle's own exposition of them in Rom. iii. 21-26. 
There the divine righteousness is defined as a righteousness 
through faith in Jesus Christ. Those who believe are 
justified (diKaiovfievoi) freely by God's grace through the 
redemption that is in Christ Jesus. And Christ Jesus in this 
particular connection is the Son of God whom God has set 
forth, as a propitiation, through faith, in His blood. The 
decisive word in this passage is propitiation — tXao-Trjpiov — 
and without entering at this point further into the detail of 
interpretation, it will be admitted that it is only because 
Jesus Christ has the character or power of being a propitia- 
tion that there is revealed in Him a divine righteousness the 
revelation of which is gospel for sinners. Hence to com- 
prehend IKaarripiov or propitiation as he comprehended it, is 
to have the only key to his gospel. 

But there is a curious reluctance among many students of 
Paul to enter seriously into his mind at this critical point. 
Lightfoot, who has every disposition to agree with the apostle, 
formally declines the attempt. After noting that God's 
righteousness was manifested in the propitiation "inasmuch 
as sin required so great a sacrifice," he proceeds, "It is better 
not to go beyond the language of Scripture. All the moral 
difficulties connected with the atonement arise from pressing 
the imagery of the apostolic writers too far. Thus nothing 
is said here about appeasing divine wrath, nor is it stated to 
whom the sacrifice of Christ is paid. The central idea of 
that sacrifice is the great work done for us, whereby boasting 
is excluded." 1 It is in a similar tone of reverent renuncia- 
tion that the authors of the International Critical Commentary 
on Romans refuse to construe the apostle's thoughts beyond 
his words. "Following the example of St. Paul and St. 

1 Notes on Epistles of St. Paul, p. 272 f. 

[152] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

John and the Epistle to the Hebrews, we speak of something 
in this great sacrifice which we call 'Propitiation.' We 
believe that the Holy Spirit spoke through these writers, 
and that it was His will that we should use this word. But 
it is a word which we must leave it to Him to interpret. 
We drop our plummet into the depths, but the line attached to 
it is too short, and it does not touch the bottom. The awful 
processes of the Divine Mind we cannot fathom. Sufficient 
for us to know that through the virtue of the One Sacrifice our 
sacrifices are accepted, that the barrier which sin places be- 
tween God and us is removed, and that there is a 'sprinkling' 
which makes us free to approach the throne of grace." 1 In 
spite of its sincere humility one may doubt whether Pau 
would have appreciated this attitude to his exposition of the 
divine rigtheousness : it strikes one as rather English thar 
either apostolic or philosophic. Scholars of a different type 
fight shy of the apostle in a different way. Deissmann, foi 
example, who has devoted himself to showing that the New 
Testament is written in the ordinary language of the time. 
and that we ought to understand it as it would have been 
understood by the man in the street in Antioch or Ephesus, 
Rome or Alexandria, has an interesting note on iXaarijpLov 2 
"Early in the imperial period," he writes, "it was a not un- 
common custom to dedicate propitiatory gifts to the gods 
which were called tXao-T^pta.' The author considers it quite im- 
possible that Paul should not know the word in this sense; if 
he had not already been familiar with it by living in Cilicia, 
he had certainly read it here and there in his wanderings 
through the empire when he stood before the monuments 
of paganism and pensively contemplated what the piety of a 

1 Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 94. 

a Bible Studies, p. 131 (English translation). 

[153] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

dying civilisation had to offer to its known or unknown gods. 
That the verb irpoedero admirably suits the iXaarrjpLov taken 
as propitiatory gift, in the sense given to it in the Greek usage 
of the imperial period, requires no proof. God has publicly 
set forth the crucified Christ in His blood, in view of the cos- 
mos — to the Jews a stumblingblock, to the Greeks foolishness, 
to faith a Wo.arr\piov. The crucified Christ is the votive 
gift of the divine love for the salvation of men. Elsewhere 
it is human hands which dedicate to the deity a dead image 
of stone in order to gain his favour ; here the God of grace 
Himself erects the consoling image, for the skill and power 
of men are not sufficient . . . God's favour must be obtained 
— He Himself fulfils the preliminary conditions ; men can do 
nothing at all, they cannot so much as believe — God does 
all in Christ ; that is the religion of Paul, and our passage in 
Romans is but another expression of the same mystery of 
salvation." All this is admirable: the crucified Christ is the 
votive gift of the divine love for the salvation of men. 
Possibly, as they read the word Ihaar-qpiov, the statues 
or other propitiatory gifts to which Deissmann refers, 
and not the mercy-seat, which is designated by it in the 
Old Testament, did rise before the minds of the recipients 
of Paul's letter; but to say this is to stop short at the 
very surface of the Apostle's mind. According to Deiss- 
mann, the IXaarripLov neutralises the anger of a deity or 
secures his good will; every one knew that, and apparently 
thought no more about it. But the peculiarity of the passage 
in Romans is that Paul is applying the whole force of his 
intelligence, consciously and purposely, to this very point. 
He is explaining to himself and to others what a IXacriipLov 
is — what must be the nature of a votive gift which shall 
neutralise sin and enable God to receive as righteous those 

[154] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

who "believe" in it. It is not fair to him not to pursue his 
thought as far as he puts it in our power to do so, and it is 
surely more than unfair to say that he wishes us — much 
more that the Holy Spirit wishes us — to use particular words 
even though they do not convey to us any particular mean- 
ing. His meaning, however, in a highly argumentative 
passage like this, must be made out, not simply by reference 
to Old Testament words, like rnk? or nytV, which the 
LXX renders by iKaar-Qpiov, nor to words found in popular 
authorities approximately contemporary: it can only be 
made out from the connection of his thoughts. 1 

If we concentrate our attention upon this, some things 
become plain. Paul is supremely interested in the universal 
scope of his gospel. Before introducing the exposition of it 
in Rom. iii. 21 if. he has taken pains to show that "all the 
world" is guilty before God, and in the course of his exposi- 
tion he insists that there is no distinction between men, 
that all have sinned, that God is not the God of Jews only 
but of Gentiles also, and justifies both alike in precisely the 
same way. It seems a fair inference from this that the 
conditions for understanding the vital idea of propitiation are 
to be sought, not in any peculiarities of Jewish or of pagan 

1 In his later work, Paulus, Deissmann gives another illustration of what 
the writer can only regard as a refusal to take Paul's thoughts seriously. He 
makes the irlffnt 'Irj<rov Xpiarov — faith in Jesus Christ — "Christusglauben": 
not faith of which Christ is the object, but such faith as one can have in God 
only in virtue of being "in Christ"; and he even introduces into the grammar, 
where one had thought himself safe from such phantasmata, what he calls a 
genitivus mysticus to cover this interpretation. It is easy for him then — and 
in a manner it is quite legitimate — to regard justification, adoption, recon- 
ciliation, forgiveness, and redemption, as no more than various ways of 
presenting the same thing. The Christusglauben is the Kraftzentrum, von 
dem die vielen Einzelbekenntnisse iiber das Heil in Christus ausstrahlen. 
All these Christian blessings, however, depend on the i\a<rT-fjpiov } and not to 
think out what it means on the apostle's lines is the gravest omission of all. 

[155] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

history, but in the human conscience which is common to 
both. If we have not the key to it in ourselves, no learning 
will put it into our hearts. 

According to Paul, it is God who sets forth Christ as a 
propitiation, and as the propitiation in any case deals with sin 
for its removal, the setting forth of it is on God's part an act 
of grace. It is a manifestation of God in the character of a 
sin-forgiving God. Many modern interpreters of Paul find 
the meaning of the passage exhausted here. What the 
apostle insists upon is indeed that God makes in the propitia- 
tion a demonstration of His righteousness, but His righteous- 
ness, it is argued, is virtually identical with His grace. The 
meaning is that God would not be righteous — in other words, 
He would not do justice to Himself, He would not act in 
accordance with His real character — if He simply let sin take 
its course, and allowed sinners helplessly to perish under it. 
To be true to Himself, or, what is the same thing, to display 
His righteousness, He had to interpose in grace for man's 
salvation. It was by doing so, by enabling man to become 
a partaker in the divine nature, that He demonstrated Him- 
self to be a righteous God; this, and nothing else, is the 
burden of the whole passage. No one, of course, can have 
any interest in disputing that God in setting forth Christ as 
a propitiation acts in harmony with His own nature: the 
gospel rests upon the character of God, and that character 
is revealed in it as it is nowhere else. God would not have 
done justice to Himself if He had not made Himself known 
as a Saviour. But though no Christian would dispute this, 
it is not a point on which stress is laid in the New Testament. 
Perhaps this is because it slips over too easily into the idea 
that salvation is something we are entitled to count upon, 
and that God would lose more than we if a way of salvation 

[156] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

were not revealed. A temper to which such thoughts were 
habitual would hardly have seemed to the apostles a temper 
becoming Christian piety; the wonder of salvation was never 
so dulled for them that they could even seem to take it for 
granted. Salvation meant Christ; it meant Christ crucified, 
Christ the propitiation; and though they knew and declared 
that this Christ was the gift of God's love, it would never 
have occurred to them that God would have done Himself 
injustice — still less, that He would have done them injustice 
— unless He had so sent Christ. This is a theorem which 
they nowhere state, which they do not argue, and which it is 
permissible to think would have repelled rather than attracted 
them. Certainly it is not the theorem which Paul argues 
here. We do not need to be afraid that the apostle will lose 
the consciousness of God's grace because he does not in this 
way identify with it the divine righteousness. It stands on 
its own basis. We are justified freely by it. It is commended 
to us signally in Christ the propitiation, who when we were yet 
sinners died for us. But what is argued for, in connection with 
the propitiation, especially in Rom. iii. 25 f., is something 
different. To put it in a word, it is that in Christ as IKaarripiov 
justice is done not only to the grace of God but to His wrath 
— to that solemn reaction of God against all ungodliness and 
unrighteousness of men from which the apostle sets out in 
the exposition of his gospel (Rom. i. 18). 

Paul is not preaching to men, but to sinners, to men who 
know what a bad conscience is, and who have a witness within 
them from which there is no appeal that the wages of sin is 
death. They have never analysed death, and have no interest 
in the ingenious distinctions which present it as temporal, 
spiritual, or eternal; to conscience it is one and indivisible, 
and whatever else it may be, it is God's annihilating sentence 

[157] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

on sin. It is part of the total reality which sin is for the 
conscience; and as nothing can be of any use to the sinner 
in which the reality of sin, or any part of it, is ignored, so, 
it may be said, to a IKaar-qpiov death is vital. This is why 
God set forth Christ as a propitiation in His blood. This is 
why in every part of the New Testament such stress is laid 
upon His death. He died for the ungodly. He loosed us 
from our sins by His blood. In him we have our redemption 
through His bloody even the forgiveness of our trespasses. He 
put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. There is a tragic 
reality in redemption, not inferior to, but rather identical 
with, the tragic reality of sin; and apart from this Christ 
would not have the character of a IXaaTVpLov. He would 
not do justice to God's attitude to sin, as one who not only 
forgives but inexorably repels and condemns it; He would 
not enable God to be in this sense just in the very act in 
which He justifies the man who can be adequately described 
as a believer in Jesus. This is the case which Paul argues 
in the passage with which we are now dealing. It is as 
though God's attitude to sin had up till now been equivocal, 
and had laid His righteousness open to impeachment. He 
had not dealt with men after their sins. He had been for- 
bearing. He had passed by, if He had not pardoned, offences 
in times past. 1 But the ground on which He had so acted 

1 For the distinction of irdpevis and &<pecris, on which the passage hinges, 
see Lightfoot's note ad he. To take 5td tt)v irapeaiv as if it were equivalent 
to <5i& ti}s d<f>^ffeios ) in order to make forgiveness itself the manifestation of 
God's righteousness (i.e. His grace), is not to interpret the apostle, but to 
rewrite him. It is effectively refuted, to go no further, by the distinction 
between the past (twv irpoyeyovoTuv ap.apTr]p.aTU)p) } when sins were passed by 
in God's forbearance, in a way which puzzled, or might have puzzled, the 
onlooker, and brought God's righteousness into question, and the present 
(iv t£ vvv Kcupy), when on the basis of the tXacrr^iov His righteousness is 
evinced. 

[158] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

was not apparent. It might seem as though He had been 
arbitrary or capricious, and had disregarded moral reality 
as it presses painfully on sinful men. But now, it was no 
longer possible to say so. Forgiveness, or justification, in 
the new era (kv t<# vw Kaip$), has come to men in Christ, 
whom God has set forth in His blood as a propitiation; it 
has come in One who has realised to the uttermost in His 
own person all that sin meant, One who has drunk the cup our 
sins had mingled, One who has felt all the waves and billows 
break over Him in which God's reaction against sin comes 
home to us sinners. This is of the very essence of the i\ a <TTf)- 
piov as Paul understands it. It bears witness, of course, 
to the goodness of God, for it is God who provides it, out of 
pure love, and it is the way of salvation ; but it bears witness 
also to His severity, to His inexorable repulsion of evil, to 
a righteousness on which no shadow of moral unreality must 
ever fall. This is as important to Paul as that God should be 
a forgiving or justifying God. He must also be a true God, 
to whom sin is what it is, nothing else and nothing less; 
and in the propitiation which deals with sin as it is with a 
view to its removal He is revealed in both characters at once. 
There has been much discussion in this connection of 
questions not really relevant to the apostle's thought. Thus 
it has sometimes seemed necessary to define righteousness — 
in the sense in which it is ascribed to God, when He is said 
to be "righteous himself" (Rom. iii. 26) — as retributive or 
distributive ; and it has been argued that in virtue of it every 
sin must be punished, and that in the atonement the sum of 
all these punishments is laid on Christ, so that sinners may 
escape them. But all this is unreal. Quantitative categories 
are meaningless in the moral world. To say that the sin 
of the world in all its tragic reality was borne by Christ on 

[159] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

His cross, so that He is a propitiation for that sin, is one 
thing; to say that the penalties due to all men's offences 
were summed up and inflicted on him, is another and an 
entirely different thing. He came into our lot as sinners, 
and was baptized with our baptism ; but this truth, essential as 
it is to the gospel, is spiritual, and not a truth to be expressed 
in terms of book-keeping. 

Again, in this same connection, there has been much in- 
vestigation of sacrifice, and of the ideas associated with it 
in Paul's mind. No doubt for him the propitiation was sacri- 
ficial ; when he thought of Christ as set forth by God in His 
blood, he thought of Him as a sacrifice in which atonement 
was made for sins. But this is precisely one of the points at 
which it is easy to go astray. To investigate the history of 
sacrifice does not help us. There may quite well have been 
a time at which sacrifice had no relation to sin, or no peculiar 
relation to it which the worshipper could have defined. 
There certainly was a time when some sacrifices had a peculiar 
significance assigned to them as propitiatory or piacular: 
the later parts of the Jewish law illustrate this. But in the 
New Testament age sacrifice among the Jews was really a 
survival. It was prescribed in the law, and obedience to 
the law was a matter of conscience ; but while in some vague 
sense all sacrifices, and not merely the sin or trespass offerings 
of the Old Testament, were probably regarded as having 
propitiatory power, there was no doctrine of the nature of 
sacrifice, or of the way in which it took effect. 1 We may say, 
indeed, as has been already remarked, 2 that the value of 
any sacrifice is its value for God, or that it makes an objective 
atonement; and so we may say of the propitiation in Romans 

1 Vide Holtzmann, Lehrbuch des neut. Theologie, i. 80 ff. 
8 Vide supra, p. 30. 

[160] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

iii. No doubt this propitiation has value also for men, and is 
intended to appeal to them, but what it does in the first 
instance is to meet divine necessities, the realities of the 
moral world as they exist in the order of God. If it did not 
meet these necessities, then forgiveness as the gospel knows 
and proclaims it could never come to men. God forgives 
our sins through Him who died for them. 

This is the real basis in the New Testament for such a 
formula as that Christ by the sacrifice of Himself for sin 
satisfied divine justice. We must not seek for it as mere 
material or quantitative expression, but neither must we 
let it go. If we are to stand on New Testament ground, pro- 
pitiation is a word which we cannot discard — there we must 
agree with Dr. Sanday — and propitiation can never be defined 
except by reference to God. It is a hasty inference to say that * 
this means that Christ, with a love to sinners greater than that 
of the Father, bought from the Father the forgiveness He was 
unable or unwilling to bestow freely; and it is equally a 
hasty inference to say that because God provided the propitia- 
tion its sole reference must have been to men, not to Himself. 
Its reference is to sin, and what it signifies is that in the very 
process through which God's forgiveness comes to sinners 
justice is done, and must be done, to the divine order in which 
sin has been committed, and in which sin and death are one. 
In other words, it is divinely necessary — necessary not only 
with a view to impressing men, but necessary in order that 
God may be true to Himself and to the moral order He has 
established in the world — that sin, in the very process in 
which it is forgiven, should also, in all its reality, be borne. 
This is what is done by Christ in His blood. He enters into 
our lot as sinful men. In the unfathomable words of the 
apostle elsewhere, He is made sin for us. No element of 

[161] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the tremendous reality of sin, as that reality is determined 
in the divine order, is ignored or evaded by Him. On the 
contrary, sin is exhausted in His experience on the cross; 
the cup is not tasted but drained. The forgiveness which 
comes through Him will carry deep into the heart of man the 
same sense of sin's reality in the divine order, and in doing 
so it will be the basis of man's reconciliation to God. But in 
itself, the propitiation is the recognition of what sin is to 
God, in all its solemn reality; it is the acceptance of the 
facts of the case, as they are in the truth of God. It is the 
manifestation of the ultimate truth about forgiveness: 
namely, that sin is only forgiven as it is borne. He bore our 
sins in His own body on the tree: that is the propitiation. 
It is the satisfaction of divine necessities, and it has value not 
only for us, but for God. In that sense, though Christ is 
God's gift to us, the propitiation is objective; it is the voice 
of God, no less than that of the sinner, which says, "Thou, O 
Christ, art all I want; more than all in Thee I find." And 
this is our hope towards God. It is not that the love of God 
has inspired us to repent, but that Christ in the love of God 
has borne our sins. 

Throughout the passage in which Paul explains the pro- 
pitiation he makes constant reference to faith. The righteous- 
ness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ. It is for all who 
believe. God set forth Christ in His blood, as a propitiation, 
through faith. The man for whom the propitiation avails, 
the man who is justified by God, is he who can be charac- 
terised by his faith in Jesus. But what is faith ? There is 
nowhere any definition of it in Paul, and it is idle to look for 
its meaning in the lexicon. It is obviously, in this passage, 
correlative to the propitiation; it is that which Christ in 
His character of propitiation appeals for and is designed to 

[162] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

evoke in the hearts of sinful men. When the sinner stands 
before Christ on His cross, Christ a propitiation, bearing the 
sin of the world, what is he to do"? What he sees there is 
the astounding truth that the last reality in the world is not, 
as he might have feared, sin, condemnation, estrangement, 
death, but a love which bears sin, taking it in all its dreadful 
reality upon itself, and, out of the very passion in which it 
does so, appealing to him. How is he to respond to this 
appeal? Paul has no difficulty in answering: he must 
respond by faith. He must trust himself to such love in- 
stantly, unreservedly, for ever. He cannot negotiate with 
God about it. He cannot suggest that perhaps upon recon- 
sideration something else might be found which would suit 
all parties better than sin-bearing love on the one side and 
the unconditional acceptance of it and surrender to it on 
the other. He cannot suggest that less than the propitia- 
tion might meet the demands of his case, and that he might 
be saved in a way which did not make him so deeply Christ's 
debtor. He cannot qualify his indebtedness by the idea that 
a life of good works in future will enable him, at least to some 
extent, to clear scores with Christ, and to stand upon his own 
feet. There is a disproportion which makes them absurd 
and impious between all such ideas and Christ the propitia- 
tion, Christ in the love of God bearing the sin of the world. 
Once we see what that is, we see there is only one right thing 
to do with it: to trust it instantly, and to the uttermost. 
Of course we can turn away from it, and live — and die — in 
our sins. We can ignore it and harden our hearts against it, 
as we can against any appeal of any love. But that is wrong. 
The only right thing to do is trust it, to let go, to abandon 
ourselves to it, keeping nothing back. This is what Paul 
means by faith. And it is the whole of religion on the inner 

[163] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

side, just as Christ the propitiation, or the sin-bearing love 
of God, is the whole of religion on the outer side — the whole, 
at all events, of the gospel, that is, of Christianity as the 
religion of redemption from sin. When a man believes in 
this sense, he does the only thing which it is right to do 
in the presence of Christ, and it puts him right with God. 
It really puts him right. There is nothing imaginary or 
fictitious about it. Sinner as he is, his whole being comes 
into a new relation to God through his faith, a relation in 
which there is no more condemnation. God justifies the 
ungodly man on the basis of his faith in Jesus, and there is 
nothing unreal about the justification. He proclaims and 
treats him as one who is right with Himself. And he is right 
with Himself. As long as he maintains the attitude of 
faith he remains right, nor is there any other attitude in 
which he can ever be right. Christ makes for ever the same 
appeal, which demands for ever the same response, and in 
that appeal and response Christianity, including the gospel 
message and the Christian life, is exhausted. 

If this is, as the writer is convinced, the true interpreta- 
tion of Paul, many of the questions which have been raised in 
connection with his gospel are unreal. The Catholic idea 
of a fides informis, as distinguished from a fides caritate 
formata, is unreal. The faith which is a response to love is 
in its very essence a fides caritate formata: there is no other 
kind of faith possible in the circumstances. In the soul's 
unreserved abandonment of itself to the sin-bearing Christ 
trust and love are indissolubly intertwined, and there would 
be no faith if either could be eliminated. Similarly the dis- 
tinction of imputed and infused righteousness is unreal. 
The man who believes in Christ the propitiation — who stakes 
his whole being on sin-bearing love as the last reality in the 

[164] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

universe — is not fictitiously regarded as right with God; 
he actually is right with God, and God treats him as such. 
He is in the right attitude to God the Redeemer, the atti- 
tude which has the promise and potency of all Tightness or 
righteousness in it, and it only introduces intellectual and 
moral confusion to make artificial distinctions at this point. 
It is unreal also — and this is the modern form of these earlier 
unrealities — to argue that there are two gospels in Paul: 
one, the gospel of salvation through Christ the propitiation, 
a gospel open to be described as forensic, judicial, Pharisaical, 
non-moral, or by whatever opprobrious term we please; 
and the other, a gospel of mystical union with Christ, sublime, 
ideal, ethical, spiritual, and quite unrelated to the first. 
Broadly speaking, the first is said to be expounded in Romans 
cc. iii.-v., and the second in Romans cc. vi.-viiL There is no 
ground for this refusal to take a stereoscopic view of Paul's 
gospel. The word in which all its aspects are united and 
solidified is "faith" ; and the faith which in Gal. ii., Phil, iii., 
or Rom. vi.-viii. is vindicated by appeal to its spiritual power 
and fertility is the very same which is exhibited in Rom. iii.-v. 
as the response of the sinful soul to Christ the propitiation. 
There was no other faith known to Paul than that of which 
he speaks in Rom. iii. 21-26; and it was that faith in virtue 
of which his whole being was absorbed, so to speak, in Christ 
who died for him. 1 To contrast a faith which unites sinners 

1 1 have quoted elsewhere, but it is impossible to quote too often, the 
lines of St. Bernard in which the alleged two gospels in St. Paul are put in 
their true light, the gospel of the propitiation containing the power which 
evokes in the believing soul all the virtues which those who distinguish them 
ascribe to the other: 

"Propter mortem quam tulisti 
Quando pro me defecisti, 
Cordis mei cor dilectum 
In te meum fer affectum." 

[165] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

to Christ in His death and resurrection, and so enables them 
to die to sin and live to God, with faith in Christ as a pro- 
pitiation for sin, is to draw a distinction which Paul would 
not have received, and could not have been made to under- 
stand. It was in His character of propitiation, the embodi- 
ment of sin-bearing love, that Christ appealed to Paul; and 
it was in that character, and no other, that His attraction 
was so irresistible, that Paul in the response of faith lost 
himself in His Lord. This is the only expression he can give 
to the one experience in which his whole Christian life was 
contained. "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is 
no more I who live; the life in me is Christ's. And the life 
I now live in the flesh I live by faith, faith in the Son of 
God who loved me and gave up himself for me." Nothing 
could show more clearly that faith is the whole of Chris- 
tianity subjectively or experimentally, just as Christ is the 
whole of it objectively or historically, and that it is as impos- 
sible to supplement the one as the other. We must not eke 
out faith by works or love, any more than we must make 
good the deficiencies of the objective Christ by stray thoughts 
on the Spirit or the sacraments. Faith is the appropriation 
of Christ, and apart from Christ and faith, not only works 
and love, but sacraments and Spirit, are words without mean- 
ing. In experience, the Spirit is indistinguishable from the 
assurance that God is sin-bearing love; and to have that 
assurance in overpowering strength — as the apostle had it 
through faith in Christ — is to be full of the Holy Spirit. This 
again, it may be said, is everything in Christianity. 

There are various peculiarities in Paul's presentation of his 
gospel which are often dwelt on, but they are not vital to his 
doctrine of reconciliation. The chief of these is his doctrine 
of the law. There are interpreters by whom this is put in 

[166] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the forefront of his gospel, and by whom, therefore, the whole 
doctrine of Christ as iKacr^pvov is represented as incidental 
to the controversy between Judaism and Christianity. The 
controversy is dead, at least in the form it had in the apostolic 
age, and consequently the idea of the iKaar-qpiov or pro- 
pitiation is dead along with it. So the argument runs. But 
it is quite unsound. As has been pointed out above, Paul 
preaches Christ as propitiation to all men alike, Gentiles as 
well as Jews, and he trusts, as every evangelist does, to some- 
thing in the common conscience, not to any Jewish theo- 
logoumenon about the Mosaic law, to bear witness to its 
truth. When he argues in Gal. iii. 13, that Christ became a 
curse for us — that is, in the first instance for the Jews — 
through His crucifixion, because the law of Moses says, 
"Cursed is every one that hangeth upon a tree," it is quite 
evident that his argument is unequal to his thought. The 
cross no more exhausts what is meant by the curse, than the 
two criminals who happened to be executed along with Jesus 
exhaust what is meant by His being numbered with trans- 
gressors, or the ass on which He rode into Jerusalem is the 
full proof of His sovereignty. It is not Jewish law, in the 
legal or statutory sense, to which justice is done in the pro- 
pitiation, though Paul would no doubt have admitted that 
the propitiation has its due application there; it is law in 
the large sense of the ethical necessities which determine all 
the relations of God and man. For law in this large sense 
Paul had the profoundest reverence. He knew that it could 
never be treated as though it were not, not even by God, and 
not even in the act of forgiveness. It is not to be sneered 
at, nor is reference to it to be decried, as though it were 
degrading the relation of God to man with that of a ruler 
to his subjects, or even that of a judge to the criminals at 

[167] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

his bar. Law in this universal sense is the very element of 
the spiritual life which is common to God and man, and its 
sanctity is guarded in the Pauline gospel from the beginning 
of the Christian life to the end. Homage is paid to it in 
Christ the propitiation, as we enter on the way, and homage 
is paid to it at the close in that last judgment in which God 
renders to every man according to his works. The divine 
righteousness by which God justifies the ungodly is indeed 
revealed x^pis vdfiov — no obedience to any statute con- 
tributes to putting us right with God; but it is not revealed 
outside of, but within, and always in harmony with, the 
constitution of a moral world in which God and man live a 
common life. 

It would be an imperfect view of the Pauline doctrine of 
reconciliation which did not emphasise its absoluteness or 
finality. "There is therefore now no condemnation to them 
that are in Christ Jesus." The man who believes absolutely 
in Christ is absolutely right with God. He has in Christ an 
assurance of God's love which triumphs over everything. 
Neither sin nor death, neither the flesh nor the law, can 
depress or discomfort him more. This, at all events, is the 
ideal, and there are high hours, like that in which he wrote 
the eighth chapter of Romans, in which for Paul it seems to 
be realised. Yet for beings who live in time there must 
always be such a thing as suspense, and it will have its place 
even in the spiritual life. Religion is described by Hegel as 
a form of the absolute consciousness, or, as Halyburton says, 
Eternity is wrapt up and implied in all its truths; and so it 
is with that which here concerns us. Reconciliation to God, 
or justification, is an eternal blessing which is fully enjoyed 
in the present; having been justified by faith, we have peace 
with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. But when we think 

[168] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

of the future, the justification which we have already re- 
ceived through faith comes again into a sort of suspense. 
Paul even conceives of it, in a very characteristic passage, 
eschatologically : "We by the Spirit in virtue of faith await 
the hope of justification" (rjfiels yap irvevnan U 7rto-T€OJS 
8\tL8cl SiKaioavvrjs aweKdexoneda, Gal. V. 5). Every word in 
this is significant. The emphatic we means that this is the 
Christian attitude as contrasted with the Jewish one which 
counted on statutory obedience, or works of law. Faith 
and the Spirit are correlative terms. The Spirit describes 
the Christian life as divinely determined, or as the gift of 
God; faith describes the very same life as humanly condi- 
tioned, a life which from first to last is one of trust in Christ. 
It is idle to try to separate these two from each other. There 
is no Christian experience whatever of which it cannot be 
said in the same instant that it is the Spirit of God and the 
faith of man. But this life at once divine and human is 
not yet consummated, nay, it is not lifted above all risks 
and uncertainties. We are saved in hope. The final sen- 
tence of dUcuoi has not yet been pronounced, and we look 
out with eagerness for it. With eagerness, but not with 
misgiving; for faith and the Spirit bring the future into the 
present — give us an earnest of what is to come — and, by 
grasping the eternal love of God in Christ the propitiation 
for sin, raise us effectively above all that is disconcerting or 
disquieting in time. In this respect Paul's doctrine of the 
reconciled or justified life is like every other which recog- 
nises that both time and eternity are modes in which life 
has to be lived. The doctrine of justification by faith — 
in other words, of reconciliation to God, or acceptance with 
Him once for all, on the ground of abandoning self to His 
sin-bearing love in Christ — answers to the eternal aspect, 

[169] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

and it is necessary if there is to be such a thing in life as 
that joyful assurance which is so characteristic of the New 
Testament. The doctrine of judgment according to works, 
on the other hand, answers to the temporal aspect, and it 
is necessary to be a check on presumption, and to maintain 
that tenderness of conscience and moral austerity which 
are equally characteristic of apostolic Christianity. It is a 
mistake to think of these doctrines — justification by faith 
and judgment according to works — as peculiarities of Paul, 
antinomies to which he was driven because he had principles 
at work in his mind which, though he did not know it, were 
ultimately incompatible. They were no more incompatible 
than man's power to live in time with all its suspense and 
uncertainty, and to realise in time the possession of divine 
and eternal good. And they are not peculiar to Paul. The 
doctrine of justification by faith is the doctrine of the parable 
of the prodigal son. The prodigal is made right with his father, 
absolutely and finally right, not by anything he has achieved, 
nor by anything he is going to achieve, but purely by trusting 
his father's love. His sins are freely forgiven, and no longer 
count against him in the least, and he knows it, and it is 
everything in his new relation to his father. Nobody ques- 
tions the truth of the doctrine in an illustration like this. 
But it is not the only truth taught by Jesus. Jesus not 
only spoke of the parable of the prodigal son; he spoke also 
the most tremendous of all the parables — the builders on 
the rock and the sand. This is as true as the other, and it 
illustrates as perfectly the doctrine of judgment according 
to works. We need not quarrel with either, for whatever 
difficulty we may have in adjusting them logically, they are 
inevitable to our nature, and they are alike indispensable 
to our Christian life. They are forms of another — or other 

[170] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

forms of the same — Pauline doctrine: namely, that for the 
Christian law is abolished, and yet that in the Christian, and 
in him only, the just demand of the law is fulfilled. 

The Pauline doctrine of reconciliation — if we should call 
a doctrine Pauline which the apostle himself tells us ( l Cor. 
xv. 1-3), was part of the primitive Christian gospel in which 
he and the Twelve were at one — can easily be distinguished 
in all parts of the New Testament. That Christ died for 
our sins, and by doing so reconciled us to God, can quite 
fairly be said to be the burden of the apostolic gospel. But 
there are other elements in Christ and His work to which 
a certain prominence is given in this connection, and which 
accordingly ought not to be ignored. 

The Epistle of Peter, for example, uses what we might 
think characteristically Pauline language quite freely. We 
were redeemed with precious blood, the blood of Christ, 
as of a lamb without blemish and without spot (i. 19). He 
bore our sins in His own body on the tree (ii. 24). He died 
for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might 
bring us to God (iii. 18). But Peter emphasises, as Paul 
does not, the example of Christ in His sufferings, and espe- 
cially the power with v/hich the innocence and meekness of the 
great Sufferer ought to appeal to wronged and suffering 
men. "He did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth. 
When He was reviled He reviled not again ; when He suffered 
He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who 
judges righteously" (ii. 22 f.). "It is better if the will of God 
so will, that you should suffer in well-doing than in evil-do- 
ing" : it was so Christ suffered (iii. 17 f.). The idea here is that 
in the sufferings of the innocent Saviour there is something 
which has power to reconcile believers to the hardships 
and injustices of their lot; their patient and unresenting 

[171] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

endurance of such wrongs is a fellowship in His sufferings and 
has in it the promise of participation in His glory (iv. 13). 

In some respects the epistle to the Hebrews is remote from 
Paul: it gives a constant prominence, which is foreign to 
his mind, to Christ as the pattern rather than the object 
of faith. But it has its starting point and its centre where 
he also has his, in what Christ does as a propitiation. When 
the life work of the Son of God has to be condensed into a 
word, it is that "He made purgation of sins" (i. 3). When 
He is introduced as a merciful and faithful high priest, an 
idea of which Paul makes no use except in relation to the 
intercession of the risen Saviour for believers, it is "that He 
may make propitiation for the sins of the people" (ii. 17). 
He made sacrifice for the sins of the people once for all when 
He offered up Himself (vii. 27). By His own blood He 
entered once for all into the most holy place, and so obtained 
eternal redemption (ix. 12). Through eternal spirit He 
offered Himself without spot to God, and therefore His blood 
can do what that of animal sacrifices never could: it can 
cleanse the conscience from dead works to serve the living 
God (ix. 14). He has been once offered to bear the sins of 
many (ix. 28). Now once for all at the end of the world has 
He been manifested to annul sin by His sacrifice (ix. 26). 
When the author quotes the words of the 40th Psalm in 
which the doing of God's will is preferred to any kind of 
sacrifice, and applies them to Christ, he proceeds: "in :he 
which will we have been consecrated" — constituted a people 
1 of God — "through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ 
once for all" (x. 5-10). The gospel is the final form of reli- 
gion, for the God who is worshipped in it is the God of peace, 
who brought again from the dead the great Shepherd of the 
sheep, in the blood of an eternal covenant (xiii. 20). This is 

[172] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the heart of the epistle, and in all this the author and Paul are 
thoroughly at one. But it can hardly be questioned that 
he would have asserted, for other aspects of Christ's life 
which interested him, what may also be called a reconcil- 
ing power. It is a great concern with him to bring out the 
extent to which Christ identified Himself with men. He 
does not save us, so to speak, from afar off; He does not 
stretch a hand to help us from a distant heaven. He comes 
as close to us as He can possibly come. He becomes a par- 
taker of flesh and blood, because flesh and blood mean so 
much to us (ii. 14). He not only enters into our nature, 
He enters into our experience. He suffers what we suffer, 
and because we suffer. He is tempted in all things like as we 
are, yet without sin. His suffering is a discipline by which 
He is perfectly fitted for His calling to be a merciful and 
faithful high priest, a true captain of salvation. Even His 
death is presented in this sequence of thought. What would 
be the use to mortal men, who through fear of death are 
all their lifetime subject to bondage, of a Saviour who did 
not know what death was but by hearsay*? He entered 
with us into the darkest place of all. He tasted death for 
every man. He took part in our flesh and blood in order 
to do so — "that through death He might destroy him that 
had the power of death." He learned obedience — that is, 
He learned what obedience is, and what the life is which 
the children of God have to live — through the things which 
He suffered. And all these things which add to His experi- 
ence, and bring Him nearer to us, and perfect him in sym- 
pathy whether to deal for us with God or for God with us, 
add to His attractiveness and charm. The more we realise 
how He has identified Himself with us, the more we feel 
drawn to identify ourselves with Him. In this sense we may 

[173] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

say that there is a reconciling power in Christ whenever we 
touch Him. He is our peace, and there is virtue in the hem 
of His garment as well as in His broken heart, or in the blood 
of His cross. But that does not shunt the cross either in 
the gospel or in the presentation of it in this epistle. The 
sympathy of Jesus is not something which displaces His 
death as a propitiation for sin; it is something which qualifies 
Him to bear sin in a way which is well pleasing to God and 
appeals with peculiar power to man. Christ does not cease 
to be a sacrifice for sin, because He is a perfectly sympathetic 
high priest. He offers Himself without spot to God. The 
way He opens for us into the holiest of all is through His 
flesh. The new and final covenant, with its fundamental 
blessing of forgiveness, is a covenant in His blood. 

When we turn to the Johannine writings, we are confronted 
with an analogous situation. It used to be common to 
contrast Paul and John, and to argue that while Paul was 
concerned with the death of Jesus, John's interest was in 
His life; John was absorbed in the incarnation and Paul 
in the atonement. It was as characteristic of the one to 
say, "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us full of 
grace and truth," as it was of the other to say, "One died for 
all." Especially, play was made with the categories of redemp- 
tion and revelation for the purpose of distinguishing the two 
great New Testament writers. Both, of course, have both 
these ideas, but in Paul redemption is in the forefront, and 
it is through His redeeming work that Christ reveals the 
Father, while in John the obtrusive idea is revelation, and 
it is through the manifestation of what God is that Christ 
exercises His power to redeem. Further reflection does 
not add to the value or importance of such thoughts. Most 
students are agreed that the Pauline interpretation of Chris- 

[174] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

tianity underlies the Johannine one, and that the main 
differences between them are due to the fact that in Paul 
the essential Christian truth is exhibited directly in letters, 
while in John it is veiled or unveiled in the story of a life. 
But in the great epistle of John we find the same emphasis 
as in Paul upon Christ's work in relation to sin. Jesus 
Christ the righteous — the person who does justice in His 
life and death to the whole relations of God and man as 
affected by sin — is Himself the propitiation for our sins 
(IXaafxds: compare IXaaTrjptov in Paul), and not for ours 
only but also for the whole world (ii. 2). There is not, apart 
from this, a revelation of what God is which carries with 
it redeeming power; on the contrary, it is in the propitiation, 
and there only, that we have the revelation of redeeming 
love. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He 
loved us, and sent His son a propitiation for our sins (iv. 10). 
Not only the truth here, but the form of thought in which 
it is conceived, is as close as possible to Paul's mind, as seen 
in Rom. v. 8 : God makes good His love to us in that while 
we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Neither apostle 
thinks of arguing, — God does not forgive without a propitia- 
tion, and therefore He is not an absolutely loving God. They 
rather concur in arguing, — God, in order to forgive in con- 
sistency with Himself, provides a propitiation, and in doing 
so gives the supreme proof of love. The writer finds it im- 
possible to take any interest in the attempts that have been 
made to assign the gospel and the epistle of John to different 
authors who are supposed to be discriminated, among other 
things, by the different views they hold on this subject. The 
one primary and comprehensive word of the gospel regarding 
it is given as the testimony of John the Baptist to Jesus: 
"Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the 

[175] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

world." A lamb which takes away sin is a sacrificial lamb, 
and it is not serious when one affects to find anything else here 
than what is suggested by the iXao-juos of the epistle or the 
l\aarr]pLov of Paul. Even if we concede to the idea of 
revelation the prominence in John which is sometime: 
claimed for it, we are compelled to say that what is revealei 
is the same for both apostles, and that for both it is reveale I 
in the same way. Both see in Christ the propitiation — and 
nowhere else — the truth that God is love. The meaning of 
that truth is discovered in the propitiation — and nowhere 
else. Alike to Paul and to John it signified the conviction 
that the utlimate reality in this world of sinful men was not 
after all sin, law, judgment, death, or hell, but a goodness 
in God which bears sin in all the dreadful reality it has for 
men, and in so doing wins them to trust it, delivers them 
from sin, reconciles them to itself, and makes them partakers 
in a divine and eternal life. In this all New Testament 
writers are at one. Perhaps it is an effect of the Johannine 
interest in revelation that when the Christian life is pre- 
sented "mystically" it is as a life in God — Christ carries us, 
so to speak, beyond Himself to the Father; whereas in Paul 
it is as a life in Christ — the soul rests in the Saviour who died 
for us and rose again. But all such contrasts are relative. 
The mysticism of John xv., for example, is quite Pauline, 
concerned from first to last with abiding in Christ, while 
Paul addresses the Thessalonians as a church "in God the 
Father" as well as in the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Though the primary form of reconciliation is the sinner's 
reconciliation to God, this carries with it other modes of 
reconciliation to which Paul in particular directs attention. 
Thus it involves the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile, or 
rather of all races of men to each other. It is when men 

[i 7 6] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

are not right with God that they are most apt to fall out with 
each other, and in coming into right relations to God they 
discover that they are at one, in all that is deepest in their 
nature and their interests, with multitudes of whom they 
had been ignorant or from whom they had been estranged 
by prejudice and suspicion. The apostle regards this as an 
important truth. Through Christ we all have our access 
by one Spirit unto the Father: our reconciliation to God 
includes our gathering together as one body in Christ. The 
reconciliation of individuals creates the Church (Eph. ii. 14 
ff.). It is not so much the carrying of this process one step 
further, in the way of experience, as a characteristic assertion 
of the absoluteness of Christianity, when we find Paul declar- 
ing to the Colossians, that it has pleased the Father through 
Christ "to reconcile all things to Himself . . . whether they 
be things on earth or things in heaven." The reconciliation 
achieved in Christ is so transcendent and wonderful, that 
there is no limit to its scope. Wherever we have to think 
of reconciliation, in the seen world or the unseen, in Him 
lie the love and power by which it must be achieved. Though 
we cannot tell precisely what Paul had in his mind when he 
spoke of things in heaven as needing reconciliation, we can 
understand his feeling; there is no problem of reconciliation 
too hard for the love which has borne our sins at the cross. 1 

The term reconciliation is not applied by the apostle to 
the process by which men (as we might say) are reconciled 
to the conditions of existence, but the truth which can be 
thus designated bulks largely in his mind. He expresses it 
in such daring words as, "All things are yours . . . the world, 
or life, or death" ; or again, "All things work together for good 
to them that love God" ; or most sublimely in the end of the 

1 The Death of Christ, 140 ff. 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

eighth chapter of Romans: "I am persuaded that neither 
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor 
any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love 
of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Reconciliation 
to God is not realised unless it includes reconciliation to the 
order of God's providence, and to the circumstances of our 
life as fixed for us by Him. We are not really reconciled 
to Him if we are at war with the conditions of human exist- 
ence, and lead a resentful, querulous, or despondent life. 
True reconciliation confronts the world in another mood. 
It can say, "I have learned in whatever state I am therein 
to be content." It can say, "We glory in tribulations also." 
It can look the most painful things in the face — tribulation, 
distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword — and 
cry, "In all these things we are more than conquerors through 
Him that loved us." It is of the utmost importance to keep 
this in mind when we think of the life of the justified or 
reconciled. There is a way of conceiving justification or 
reconciliation which reduces it as nearly as possible to moral 
nullity; it is something with the nature of fiction about it, 
something which speaks in terms of imputation as distinct 
from inspiration. This is not the Pauline view. If we fall 
into a mental attitude in which imputation seems to us a 
necessary stepping stone from the unreconciled to the re- 
conciled state, let us be quite clear that the "imputation," 
if we call it so, is immediately creative, inspiring, and energis- 
ing in the highest degree. Not only is God a new God, the 
world is a new world to the reconciled sinner; he is not at 
war with the conditions of life — at least he is not at a spirit- 
less, angry, discontented war with them. He knows that 
if God is for him, no one can be against him, and that his 

[178] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

very badge as a Christian is that he can overcome the world, 
combining, as Paul so characteristically combined, much 
affliction with joy in the Holy Ghost. His faith in provi- 
dence is an inference from his experience of reconciliation. 
"He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for 
us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all 
things?" 

In this survey of New Testament teaching on reconcilia- 
tion, the writer is well aware that much will be contested by 
one type of student, and much missed by another. Especially, 
perhaps, this holds of the paragraphs on Paul. There are 
those for whom Paul is pre-eminently "ein antik denkender 
Mensch" a being whose forms of thought and intellectual 
processes are remote and alien, and who, the more precisely 
he is reproduced, in that very proportion is incomprehensible 
and impossible. There are books on Paul which present 
him in this light. They are copious on the survivals of 
Pharisaical dogma in the apostle, and they are becoming 
copious on the infiltration into his mind of ideas derived from 
the Hellenistic mystery religions. But they do not set in 
any relief what it was that gave Paul his spiritual power 
while he lived, and has made him incomparably the greatest 
source of spiritual revivals in the Christian Church for nearly 
two thousand years. The writer frankly admits that his 
interest in Paul is not in the historical peculiarities which 
we cannot assimilate, but in that which gave him his place 
in the Church from the beginning, and has kept him in it 
ever since. It is this which he has aimed to reproduce in 
the foregoing pages. To say that Paul is unintelligible, or 
that he presents Christianity in a way which does it every 
kind of injustice and is finally unacceptable to us, is to fly 
in the face of history and experience. There have always 

[179] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

been people who found Paul intelligible and accepted the 
gospel as he preached it. There are such people still, if 
not in theological class rooms, then in mission halls, at street 
corners, in lonely rooms. It is not historical scholarship 
that is wanted for the understanding of him, and neither is 
it the insight of genius: it is despair. Paul did not preach 
for scholars, nor even for philosophers; he preached for 
sinners. He had no gospel except for men whose mouths 
were stopped, and who were standing condemned at the 
bar of God. They understood him, and they find him 
eminently intelligible still. When a man has the simplicity 
to say, with Dr. Chalmers, "What could I do if God did not 
justify the ungodly?" he has the key to the Pauline gospel 
of reconciliation in his hand. What has been attempted in 
this chapter is to bring out what is vital in this gospel in its 
vital relations, ignoring everything else. It is not a chapter 
on the singularities of the ancient mind. It is a chapter on 
the gospel, as it has always been recognised in the Church, 
in the writings of the apostle. Anybody who likes may call 
it uncritical, although the criticism which pronounces a 
classic of religion, like Paul's epistles, antiquated and unin- 
telligible is surely self-condemned. As has already been 
remarked, we do not lift our theology unreflectingly and 
indiscriminately from every word the apostles wrote. But 
a sinner who has been found by the apostolic gospel cannot 
think that anything at war with it is sound, nor can a Christian 
think that the Church which has been called into being by 
this gospel will disappear, or that its essential faith and 
motives can ever be anything but vhat they have been. Its 
Christ must always be He whom God set forth as a propitia- 
tion in His blood — the Lamb of God that taketh away the 
sin of the world. 

[180] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

It is natural at this point to refer to a subject which has 
been much discussed in this connection, though the New 
Testament hardly raises it in the form in which it is most 
familiar — the relation of the atonement, or of the work of 
reconciliation, to the incarnation. There are those who 
hold that the incarnation is too great a thing to be con- 
tingent upon anything else, and especially upon such an 
unhappy chance as the appearance of sin in the world. It 
would have taken place in any case: the Son of God would 
have become man even if man had never fallen; He would 
have come in flesh to consummate creation and give the 
human race its true head and a true unity. There is an ideal 
or metaphysical necessity for the incarnation which is inde- 
pendent of sin. In spite of the fascination which this view 
has had for some speculative or ^ ^^-speculative minds, 
it may be doubted whether it has any Christian interest. 
There are hypothetical questions which it is idle to discuss, 
and they include those in which the hypothesis is that the 
world might have been something quite other than we know 
it to be. We know the world only as a sinful world, and 
we know the relation of Christ to it, experimentally, only 
as that of its Saviour from sin. Whether we can draw in- 
ferences, on the basis of this, to an original relation of the 
Son of God to nature and to the human race is, of course, an 
open question; and assuming that we could do so, it would 
be again an open question, but a very remote one, whether 
we could base on these inferences still further conclusions as 
to the probability or the inevitableness of the incarnation 
of the Son of God in a sinless world. The New Testament 
writers are not afraid to base the most far-reaching inferences 
on their experience of reconciliation. The Christ who has 
won eternal redemption, who has reconciled them to God 

[181] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

with a perfect reconciliation, who has made all things theirs, 
is a Being by relation to whom all things have to be deter- 
mined: they even say of Him, "In Him were all things cre- 
ated" ; yes, in Him, and through Him, and for Him ; He is the 
centre in which all have their unity (Col. i. 16). But they 
stick to the actual. They feel, as all serious thinkers feel, 
that the task of the mind is to understand and interpret 
what is, not to wander off into what might have been, as 
though it might find there truths sublime or more profound. 
The world we live in is the only world, and it is not think- 
ing, but some other intellectual exercise, which concerns 
itself with a world we have never known and can never know. 
Probably this is why the New Testament ignores the question 
referred to, and when it speaks of Christ's coming connects 
it with His work of reconciliation, and contemplates it in 
no other light. He came to seek and to save that which was 
lost. He came to give His life a ransom. The meaning of 
all these expressions is that He came for us, and it is a 
Christian instinct which confines the New Testament to this 
point of view. It has been remarked above that though 
the work of reconciliation has its source in the character of 
God, so that it may be said that God would not have done 
Himself justice unless He had manifested Himself as He has 
done in Christ, this is not a mode of statement which has 
apostolic support; it approaches too closely to the feeling 
that the Christian revelation of God is a thing on which the 
sinner can of course presume. It is the same with the point 
which is now before us. An incarnation which would have 
taken place in any event is an incarnation which does not 
put the sinner under that obligation to Christ under which 
he is put by an incarnation which is necessitated and deter- 
mined by the loving will to save sinners by bearing their 

[182] 



NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

sins. Schleiermacher, who takes both sides on every 
question, and is of all philosophers least exposed to the 
charge of being right in what he asserts and wrong in what 
he denies, tries to combine both points of view. The in- 
carnation is natural, and it is also supernatural; it involves 
the redemption of man from sin, and at the same time the 
carrying out of the original idea of His creation; it con- 
summates creation, as well as saves the human race. But 
he would be a bold man who ventured to maintain that the 
total impression made by Schleiermacher is in keeping 
with the total impression made by the New Testament. 
There is as much of Spinoza in his intellectual atmosphere 
as of Paul or John, and in his moral atmosphere there is 
more. But the real objection to the speculative theories 
of an incarnation independent of sin is that they assume us 
to know, in independence of the Saviour and of His sin- 
bearing work, what incarnation means. But this we do 
not know at all. What the writer understands, and alone 
can understand, by the incarnation, is the actual historical 
life and death of Christ. What many of those who use the 
term understand by it is the taking up of human nature 
into union with a divine person. In this sense, the incarna- 
tion is the presupposition of the life of Jesus, it is not identical 
with that life. There is a deep gulf between these two views, 
and when they express themselves, as they sometimes do, 
in similar language, it is apt to lead to misunderstanding. 
Nothing is commoner, for instance, than for those who 
conceive the incarnation as the taking up of human nature 
into union with the divine, to say that the incarnation is 
itself the atonement; in the person of the God-man humanity 
as such is reconciled to God. To the writer such expres- 
sions are as good as meaningless, and neither for the evangelist 

[183] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

nor the theologian can he see that they have any value. 
But looking at the actual life and death of Jesus as the 
proper definition of the term incarnation — the sum of reality 
apart from which incarnation is an empty sound — he would 
have no difficulty in saying that the incarnation and the 
atonement, or the incarnation and the work of reconciling 
man to God, were all one. The traditional dogmatic con- 
ception of the incarnation, with which the idea of an incarna- 
tion independent of sin, and designed to consummate creation, 
is usually connected, does not lift us into a region of eternal 
or ideal truth ; it does not enlighten our minds in the knowl- 
edge of Christ ; it only lifts us out of the region of historical 
and moral reality. We have the practical interest of Chris- 
tianity as well as the broad sense of the New Testament 
with us when we stand by the view that Christ Jesus came 
into the world to save sinners. 



[184] 



CHAPTER IV 

THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

The sketch of reconciliation as a Christian experience, the 
survey of Christian thought upon it from the earliest times 
to the present, and the study of the manner in which it is 
exhibited and interpreted in the New Testament, contribute 
in various ways to the construction of a formal doctrine on 
the subject. It is this which we have now to attempt. 

Every one who is familiar with systems of philosophy or 
theology must have been struck with the fact that there is 
no such thing in them as in other departments of thought 
would be called proof. The system as a whole is taken for 
granted, and the only proof offered for any part is that it is 
consistent with the whole, and becomes intelligible in the 
light of it. The central doctrine of Christianity is sometimes 
presented in this way. It must be deduced, it is said, from 
God and from His end in the ethical order, and be demon- 
strated to be merely the consistent carrying out of God's 
nature and purpose, not an exception to them. But against 
this it is fair to say that sin creates what for us can never 
be anything but an unanticipated situation, the dealing 
with which must always have something exceptional about 
it; and further, that we do not understand God's nature 
and purpose except by an inference backward from that 
very work of reconciliation which is supposed to be deduced 
from them. In other words, the supposed deduction is 

[185] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

unreal. It is unreal to say, "God is love, and from the con- 
ception of love as such we shall deduce the idea and the 
necessity of reconciliation," when it is to the fact and experi- 
ence of reconciliation, not deductions but data, that we owe 
the very idea that God is love. We must not in our treat- 
ment of a subject which has its reality in the world of history 
and experience be afraid of being empirical, or ambitious of 
being philosophical. In some respects Ritschl is the type 
of a positivist in theology, and any speculative strain in 
Christian doctrine is as abhorrent to him as mysticism. But 
in his exhaustive studies of what he calls the presuppositions 
of the Christian doctrine of justification and reconciliation he 
reaches some very giddy and some very obscure positions the 
vital relation of which to the doctrine to be deduced from 
them is not conspicuous. No doubt the reconciliation which 
we experience through Christ would be impossible if God 
were another kind of Being than we see Him in Christ to be ; 
or if the providential order of the world, natural and moral, 
were something quite different from what it is; or if Christ 
were just a sinful man like ourselves, with no relation to 
God but our own; or if God had no moral purpose in cre- 
ation at all. No doubt also, in their attempted definitions 
of the doctrine of reconciliation, theologians may have been 
discredited and baffled because they had not sufficiently Chris- 
tianised their ideas on these subjects, and were operating ab 
initio with conceptions of them which were ultimately incon- 
sistent with Christianity. It is not necessary, however vital 
and all determining for the Christian thinker as the expe- 
rience of reconciliation through Christ must be, to make it 
the generative principle of a conception of God and the uni- 
verse from which it can in turn be deduced by a kind of 
logical and natural necessity. It is a mere illusion that we 

[186] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

get new knowledge or new security in this way. The inves- 
tigation of experience will lead to important inferences, but 
it is the experience which gives validity to the inferences, 
not vice versa, and the experience must be its own evidence. 
It is not arbitrary if we say that the essential questions con- 
nected with the doctrine of reconciliation will come before 
us if we consider in succession the need and the possibility 
of reconciliation; the work of reconciliation as achieved by 
Christ ; and the purpose and fruits of reconciliation as exhib- 
ited in the life of the reconciled. The subject of this chapter 
is the first of these — the need and the possibility of recon- 
ciliation. 

The need of reconciliation is given in the fact of aliena- 
tion or estrangement. Man requires to be put right with 
God because, as a matter of fact, he is not right with Him. 
Such language implies, of course, the personality both of 
God and man. It implies that God is a Being who con- 
sciously deals with us as having responsibility to ourselves 
and to Him. It implies also that God is man's chief good, 
so that when we are in the right relation to Him we enjoy 
the life which is life indeed (fj ovrws $"«£: l Tim. vi. 19), 
whereas if we are estranged from Him we have only an un- 
happy death in life. 

Such language would have no meaning if there were any- 
thing arbitrary in the relations of God and man. Those 
relations are personal, but they must be determined on 
universal principles; in other words, they must be deter- 
mined by law. It is absurd to object to this, that there can 
be no interposition of a statute book between the Father 
and His child. No one wishes to conceive the relations of 
God and man as determined by statute. We know that 
they are not determined in this way. But even if in the 

[187] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

light of the Christian revelation we describe the divine and 
the human personality as Father' and child, we do not elimi- 
nate from their relation that universal element which we 
call law. We know human families in which law in this 
great sense has disappeared — families in which the heart of 
the fathers is not toward the children, nor of the children 
toward the fathers; families in which there is no moral dis- 
cipline, and in which no moral ends are being achieved ; fam- 
ilies in which natural affection, if it remains at all, remains 
as merely a physical instinct, and is never raised into a 
spiritual principle. This is not the nature of the family of 
God, in which law pervades all the relations of the Father 
and the children, though not in statutory or legal forms. 
The family exists in a world of universal moral necessities, 
and by these all the relations of its members are determined 
throughout. The 139th Psalm was written before the Chris- 
tian era, but this conception of the personal relation of God 
and man, which is implied in the doctrine of reconciliation, 
and before it in the fact of estrangement, is expressed in 
it with transcendent power. "O Lord, Thou hast searched 
me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and 
mine uprising. Thou understandest my thought afar off." 
This is not vague speculation, nor vague adoration, it is the 
most intimate and inevitable of experiences. The reader 
who has had the experience which makes it intelligible wants 
no other proof of the personality of God. When he says, 
"O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me," he knows 
that he is not talking to himself: the "Thou" in his sen- 
tence has the same reality as the "me." If any one calls 
it conscience, then it is a conscience which is objective to 
his nature and his will — not one which belongs to him, but 
one to which he belongs. This is the point from which we 

[188] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

must start in defining the need of reconciliation. There is a 
relation between God and His human creatures, a relation of 
universal moral significance, on which the blessedness of man, 
and his attainment of his chief good, are dependent, and 
this relation is in point of fact impaired. Man is somehow 
wrong with God, and the task of reconciliation is to put 
him right again. 

The consciousness of being wrong with God — in other 
words, the sense of sin — emerges in connection with some 
definite act, for which responsibility attaches to the actor. 
The act may happen to be one which is also a crime, a breach 
of some statute in the civil society to which the actor be- 
longs; or without being legally a crime, it may be a wrong to 
another person, which that other is entitled to resent ; but its 
character as sin comes into view only when we regard it as 
affecting his relation to God. It is not necessary in this con- 
nection to speculate either on the origin of evil or on a primi- 
tive state of man. Things are what they are, and we must 
take man as we find him, building on our present experience 
of sin as the one reality unquestionably within our reach. 
We have no right to assume that the origin of sin will ever be 
understood — in other words, that we shall discover the ra- 
tionale of the irrational, or that we shall be able to resolve 
the ethical into unethical or infra-ethical elements, and so 
get rid of the specifically ethical problems it presents. But 
taking it as what it is, we can bring out its nature more 
clearly before our minds. 

To do wrong gives us a bad conscience, and a bad con- 
science paralyses the moral nature. We know this even in 
our relations to one another. The child who has violated 
his father's will does not wish to meet his father, or to look 
him in the face. There is something in his heart he wishes 

[i8 9 ] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

to hide. But his whole moral health, strength, and happi- 
ness depend upon his having no secrets from his father; they 
depend, in fact, on his sharing with his father the common 
life of the family, without impediment or restraint. By his 
wrong act he has cut himself off from this, and till he over- 
comes it somehow he is morally crippled. He fears his father, 
for he knows he must disapprove of what he has done; he 
distrusts him, for he very possibly does not know that though 
his father's love has been wounded by the wrong he has done, 
it is great enough to bear his offence and to love him through 
it; and if he fears and distrusts and hides long enough, he 
is quite likely at last to hate — on the principle odisse quern 
laeseris. All this admits of easy and exact application to 
the sinner's relation to God. The bad conscience means defi- 
nitely the sense of being wrong with God — of being estranged 
from Him by what we have done, yet unable to escape 
from Him, at once alienated and answerable. It is the fun- 
damental truth with which we have to deal, that a bad con- 
science, or the sense of sin, induces moral paralysis. It dis- 
ables the moral nature on every side. It dulls moral in- 
telligence, so that unless we get deliverance from it the prac- 
tical reason or moral sense becomes vovs adoKLfws, a repro- 
bate mind (Rom. i. 28), as Paul has it; or in the terrible 
word of our Lord, the light that is in us becomes darkness. 
It impairs even the power to repent, so that the more we 
need to sorrow for our sin with a sorrow which reaches the 
depths of our nature with healing pain, the less such sor- 
row is in our power. But above all, it relaxes and ultimately 
destroys the nerve of moral effort. One is good, that is God, 
and there is no such thing as doing good or being good, ex- 
cept in harmony with Him and in dependence on Him. How 
can any one be good who distrusts God the one spring of 

[190] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

goodness, who is afraid of God, who is hiding from God, 
who hates God? It is like asking, How can any one be 
good in spite of God the only source of goodness? It is 
this impossibility which makes reconciliation necessary if sin- 
ners are ever to achieve their chief end. A famous hymn 
cries, 

"Be of sin the double cure: 
Cleanse me from its guilt and power." 

But its guilt and power are not co-ordinate. It is its guilt 
which gives it power. Its guilt alienates us from God, and 
it is in virtue of this alienation that sin reigns in us. Hence 
to be reconciled to God is the sinner's primary need. He 
overcomes the power of sin through having its guilt annulled, 
and his bad conscience stilled. 

Thus far we have confined ourselves to the interpretation 
of the act in which the consciousness of sin emerges in the 
individual soul. But to limit our view thus — to speak as if 
God on the one hand, and the soul estranged from Him by 
a deliberate and isolated act on the other, were the only 
realities we had to consider — gives us a quite inadequate 
view of what is needed when we speak of the need of recon- 
ciliation. There is no such thing as the absolutely individual 
man with whose acts, as something between himself and God, 
we have been dealing. All men are members of a society in 
which they live and move and have their being morally, 
and in all they do, of right or wrong, they both affect and 
are affected by the body to which they belong. This has 
to be kept in mind, and it leads to two apparently contrary 
inferences. 

On the one hand, the scope of the sinner's responsibility 
is immensely enlarged. He does not sin, any more than he 
lives, to himself. His act tells not only on himself and on 

[191] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

God, but on the society of which he is a member. It sets 
in motion a force which is beyond his control, and which 
acts according to its own laws, or the laws of society and 
human nature, in ever widening circles. There has always 
been some sense of this in the human mind, and it has been 
reinforced and deeply impressed on intelligence and imagina- 
tion by much of the teaching of science. To see this has 
consequences for a doctrine of reconciliation. It means that 
reconciliation will be a greater work than might at first have 
been anticipated — more far-reaching and more difficult. It 
must embrace in its scope not only the individual sinner whose 
original bad action has estranged him from God, but the so- 
ciety to which he belongs, and in which that bad action has 
originated unmeasured evils which he never contemplated. 
It must deal somehow with the sin of his world, and tram- 
mel up the consequences which drive him to despair. We 
become conscious that the individual cannot be reconciled 
to God except by a reconciliation in which the interest of 
all his fellows is identical with his own. 

On the other hand, the consideration of man's essentially 
social nature has sometimes seemed to extenuate his personal 
guilt, and by doing so to make reconciliation appear easier 
or less necessary. The development of a social or corporate 
conscience has been used or abused in this sense. Sinners 
of a certain type — sinners as classes rather than as indi- 
viduals — have been disposed to say of their class: ' 'Society 
is responsible for this, not we. We are more sinned against 
than sinning." The man who is looking for an excuse is 
not the best judge in questions of conscience, and the more 
general and imposing the excuse is, the less weight, pro- 
bably, will it bear. Nevertheless there is something in the 
idea of corporate or social responsibility which needs to be 

[192] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

taken account of in considering the need of reconciliation. 
It does not imply that the individual can ever discharge 
himself entirely of responsibility for what he has done. His 
responsibility is that of a member of society, but it does not 
for that reason cease to be real. There is no such thing as 
a common or corporate conscience the existence of which 
excludes the individuals whose consciences live in it from 
the moral world and their responsibilities there. But while 
the responsibility of the individual remains real, and the need 
of reconciliation is therefore as unquestionable as ever, some 
light is perhaps thrown upon the possibility of it and the 
mode in which it may operate. If sin belonged to the in- 
dividual alone, if his individual being were freely, fully, and 
finally expressed in it, reconciliation might well appear in- 
conceivable. But the existence of a common or corporate 
conscience, of which his conscience for better or worse is a 
constituent, implies also the existence of a common moral 
life, with channels through which reconciling as well as dis- 
integrating influences may flow. Wrong can be introduced 
into this common life by the act of an individual, wrong 
which works throughout the whole with alienating and de- 
basing power, filling men with distrust and dislike of God. 
But if that is possible, much more — so must the Christian 
argue — is it possible that good should be introduced into it 
by the act of an individual, good which will work through- 
out the whole with reconciling power, restoring men to 
God in trust and love. That very constitution of society 
which, when we think of the diffusion of sin from one to 
another, or from the body to the members, seems to miti- 
gate its guilt for those on whom it comes as distinct from 
those with whom it originates, provides at the same time 
the possibility that reconciling and restoring goodness may 

[193] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

be poured through the veins of the guilty, and the evil of 
sin undone. 

The distinction of an individual and of a corporate con- 
science, or of sin for which he who commits it must take the 
responsibility, and sin for which the responsibility falls on 
a society, does not exhaust the truth regarding sin, or show 
all that is meant by the need of reconciliation. The influ- 
ence of sin in society may be regarded as due in part to the 
imitation of bad examples, the acceptance of bad teaching, 
the power of bad institutions, and so forth. In other words 
it is mediated, at least to some extent, through the freedom 
of the individual; he cannot simply disclaim responsibility 
for it, and say that he cannot help it. But a complete view 
of sin exhibits it in a light which at least brings the tempta- 
tion to disclaim responsibility altogether. It is as though, 
when we saw what we mean by sin in its whole dimensions, 
the idea overbalanced itself, and ceased to be what it seemed 
at first. The individual man, whose sinful act is the starting 
point of our discussion, has not only all sorts of relations, 
voluntary and involuntary, to human society; he is related 
in a way intimate and profound to all that we mean when 
we speak of nature. It is through his birth that this rela- 
tion is mediated to him, not through his choice, but it is none 
the less real for that. The idea of a pre-existent state, in 
which the individual existed as a spiritual monad — whether 
an atom or a God — and in which he freely determined to 
appear in flesh, or for some incomprehensible sin was doomed 
so to appear — is one which has indeed been appealed to as a 
way of escape from intellectual and moral perplexities at 
this point, but which will never convince any serious mind. 
Taking things as we find them, the simple fact is that we 
are born into the world, and into the constitution and course 

[194] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

of nature, and have to live out our life under its condi- 
tions. The saintliest man has the sap of nature in his veins. 
His roots strike down into its deepest and what will some- 
times seem its darkest places, and he has in his own bosom 
the key to all that can ever appal him in the world. Human 
nature develops on the basis of nature in general, and our 
moral nature develops on the broad basis of human nature 
as it exists in human society; with the result that when the 
moral consciousness has come to any maturity, it is not only 
a consciousness that a given act is wrong, or that in 
virtue of some particular act I have incurred an abiding 
responsibility; it is a consciousness that what I call my 
nature is in some kind of antagonism to the laws of 
the moral world, and that sin in me is as deep as 
being. 

The difficulty of construing such facts is obvious. On the 
one hand, we seem to be in contact with the most desperate 
and hopeless form of sin — sin which is identical with con- 
scious human nature; on the other, sin is presented to us 
in a form in which the responsibility of the individual for 
it disappears — in other words, it ceases to be sin at all. If 
man is guilty, he is hopelessly guilty; reconciliation to a 
holy God is impossible, simply because human nature is what 
it is; and if we maintain that, in the sense in which we are 
now contemplating sin, the individual is not guilty, we must 
transfer the responsibility for his state from himself to his 
Maker, and, instead of urging him t6 seek reconciliation to 
God, advise him to be reconciled to himself — and to his sin. 
We must either say that man is born damned, or that he 
has no responsibility for being what he is. 

The logical and ethical difficulties involved in these facts 
have given rise to some of the subtlest and most involved 

[195] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

controversies in Christian history. Perhaps of all contro- 
versies they are those of which it may most truly be said 
that the disputants are right in what they assert and wrong 
in what they deny. Augustine and his followers in the fifth 
century emphasised the sinfulness of human nature as con- 
trasted with isolated sinful actions, and they were right in 
emphasising it. Every sincere man is sorry not only for what 
he has done, but for what he is. The sin which weighs on 
us, which disables us, which defeats us, which makes us cry, 
"O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me?" is more 
than isolated acts, it is deeper than the deliberate volition 
of this or that moment, it is as deep as our very being. It 
is we who need to be saved and reconciled, and we have 
never known ourselves but as subjects of this need. It is 
our very nature which needs to be redeemed and renewed: 
no intensity of conviction is too strong for this truth. On 
the other hand, the Pelagian opponents of Augustine were 
justified in maintaining that no doctrine of sin could be 
upheld which in the long run made God the author of it, 
or which involved the conclusion that redemption was im- 
possible, or guilt unreal. It is not necessary to enter into 
the history of the controversy either in the fifth century, or 
in its renewal between the Jansenists and the Jesuits in the 
seventeenth. On the whole the Protestant Churches have 
been Augustinian in their sympathies; the Church of Rome, 
while professedly Augustinian both in the earlier and the 
later stages of the discussion, has in point of fact, under 
Jesuit influence, been much more Pelagian in its bias. In 
modern times the question has assumed other aspects and 
other dimensions. The obvious fact that the moral world 
has risen on the basis of nature has been set in the perspec- 
tive of a general doctrine of evolution. The tendency then is 

[i 9 6] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

to regard sin as inevitable; but when evolution, as is usually 
the case, is identified with "progress," or an optimistic view 
is taken of its general "upward" tendency — an "upward" 
tendency being a tendency to progressive moralisation — then, 
though inevitable, sin is not regarded as fatal. It emerges 
only that it may be transcended. A bad conscience is not 
an impracticable liability, a responsibility which we can 
neither meet nor evade; it is a kind of moral "growing pains" 
which in the course of nature will be outgrown. 

If we could think of the world as a whole without think- 
ing of any of the individuals in it, or of their definite and 
painful experiences, this vague conception of its physico- 
moral constitution would have a certain fascination for the 
mind. It is attractive enough to any one who is not vexed 
with a bad conscience, or who is not so vexed by it as to be 
driven to despair. But, as we have already seen, conscience 
not only brings a man face to face with himself, as a being 
whose very nature, rooted in the universal nature of things, 
is at variance with the moral law; it brings him face to face 
with the living God. Nothing is more real to conscience 
than its responsibility to God, and while the relation to 
nature may determine the particular cast or range of this 
responsibility, it cannot conjure away the thing itself. This 
is as true when we envisage nature through a doctrine of 
evolution as when we conceive it under any other category. 
Something in sin may be determined by the law of evolu- 
tion, but not the very thing which makes it sin. It may 
have this or that form rather than another; it may be a 
mode of sensuality, or of pride, or of foolishness, because the 
evolutionary process has been what it has been, and not 
something different; but that which constitutes the sinful- 
ness of sin, even when it is seen in the perspective of a nat- 

[197] 



L THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

ural evolution, is something which to conscience — and con- 
science is the only judge — is incommensurable with anything 
in nature. Rather than identify ourselves with it, we are 
bound to sacrifice anything in nature, including the natural 
life itself. Every one who knows anything about sin will 
admit that we should die rather than do wrong, and this 
is a conclusive proof that, however deeply our nature may 
be identified with sin, it is not finally one with it. We must 
be Augustinians without being Manichseans. We must be 
convinced that the need of redemption and reconciliation is 
desperate, and cannot be put too strongly, and at the same 
time that the possibility of redemption and reconciliation re- 
mains. Our whole nature is involved in sin, but not indis- 
tinguishably and irretrievably involved, and we disown the 
sin and protest against it even when we feel ourselves most 
hopelessly its slaves. On this the need and the possibility 
of redemption depend. 

A serious injury is done to the Christian truth about re- 
demption and reconciliation if either the one or the other ele- 
ment of the truth here indicated is ignored. This may be 
done in two opposite ways. On the one hand, for example, 
there is a widespread feeling that sin is natural and inevitable. 
But if it has a natural birth, so to speak, then in the course 
of nature it will, we may assume, die a natural death, and 
therefore there is no necessity for thinking about redemption 
or reconciliation as a way of getting rid of it. But experi- 
ence disproves the assumption here made. Though sin may 
have a natural birth it does not die a natural death; in 
every case it has to be morally sentenced and put to death. 
The vague notion which prevails to the contrary would 
dispose of sin without having the sinner so much as come 
into God's presence, and there realise what it is. On the 

[i 9 8] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

other hand, there may be a doctrine of human depravity, 
not only seriously expressing serious facts, but so exaggerated 
and uncompromising as to exclude the very possibility of 
redemption. The Westminster Divines came at least peril- 
ously near to this when they spoke of Adam's posterity as 
"utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, 
and wholly inclined to all evil." The need of redemption 
is only too powerfully expressed here, but what becomes of 
its possibility? What is left in man for even redeeming 
love to appeal to*? We must hold such a doctrine of sin as 
makes it evident that we cannot save ourselves, but not 
such a doctrine as implies that not even God can save 
us. 1 

It is not necessary to raise here any of the questions which 
have been so much discussed as to the primitive state of 
man. The basis of all theological doctrine is experience, 
and experience is always of the present. We may have all 
the experience that is necessary to convince us of the need 
of reconciliation, without having any opinions about the first 
man, or the state in which he was created, or the connection 
between his primitive and our present condition. Our life 
has its roots in nature, and we can form no conception of a 
being who originated in any other way; we cannot imagine 
what it would be to be created in some Sense mature, in- 
stead of being born and growing into maturity, with all the 

1 This is recognised in the Declaratory Act passed by the General Assembly 
of the Free Church of Scotland in 1892, which states, inter alia: "that, in 
holding and teaching, according to the Confession of Faith, the corruption 
of man's whole nature as fallen, this Church also maintains that there 
remain tokens of his greatness as created in the image of God; that he 
possesses a knowledge of God and of duty; that he is responsible for com- 
pliance with the moral law and with the Gospel ; and that, although unable 
without the aid of the Holy Spirit to return to God, he is yet capable of 
affections and actions which in themselves are virtuous and praiseworthy." 

[199] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

possible and inevitable mischances of this experience. But 
when we set our life in the perspective of an all-embracing 
natural evolution, it does not, in point of fact, lose for con- 
science its ethical character; it does not cease to need nor 
to remain capable of redemption. Within the lines of the 
evolutionary process, on the basis of it, we ourselves have 
fallen, not once but a thousand times. The disharmony 
between our nature and our vocation — between our nature 
as we know it in our moral consciousness, and our calling 
to live in union and communion with God — is the primary 
fact from which we have to start; and it is not made more 
real, more certain, or more intelligible, by any speculation 
about its origin. It does not take us an inch further on to 
say that our present condition is due to the disobedience 
of our first parents, to the corruption of their nature by the 
fall, and the transmission of that corrupted nature to their 
posterity. If this idea seems to be favoured by Paul in Ro- 
mans v. 12 ff., the other or evolutionary view of all human 
nature may seem to be supported by the apostle in l Cor. 
xv. 44-9. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which 
is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." The spir- 
itual life emerges from the basis of nature, in constant con- 
flict with it, through experience of temptation, sin, despair, 
redemption, reconciliation ; and there is no other way in which 
we can effectively think of it. We know immediately and at 
first hand the only things which are of any consequence : that 
sin is rooted in our nature so deeply, is so congenital and 
powerful, that we cannot save ourselves; and on the other 
hand, that God has made us for Himself, and has never left 
Himself without a witness in our consciences, so that the 
possibility and hope of reconciliation are not precluded. This 
is far surer and far more important than anything we can 

[200] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

find out about Adam, and it is quite independent of it. What 
Adam really represents is the unity or solidarity of the hu- 
man race in sin ; and the modern way of expressing this would 
rather be to say that the unity or solidarity of the human 
race in sin is involved in the vital organic connection of all 
men with each other, and in the disproportion which actually 
appears, in all men who have come to moral responsibil- 
ity, between what they are, and what they know they should 
be. 

We cannot say that man's nature is sinful, or that the 
common sinfulness of human nature is connected with the 
vital and organic unity of the race, without raising larger 
and if possible more difficult questions about the relation of 
the natural to the spiritual world. And these ulterior ques- 
tions, as it happens, have played a large part in the discus- 
sion of the Christian doctrine of reconciliation. Probably 
the most widespread idea about the relation of the natural 
to the spiritual world is that which simply contrasts them. 
They are realities which stand apart, which do not inter- 
penetrate, which are simply neutral to each other. At the 
utmost, nature is the stage on which the moral life is trans- 
acted. But it is quite indifferent to the quality of that life. 
The laws of nature are the same for the good man as for the 
bad; the flood drowns them both, and the lightning does 
not go out of the way of either. It is even argued that this 
moral neutrality of nature is necessary to protect the in- 
tegrity of the moral life. If nature immediately sided with 
virtue and opposed vice, if she did poetic justice on her 
stage at every turn, disinterested goodness would be impos- 
sible; man would never be able to prove that they loved 
righteousness for its own sake. Without disputing the 
amount of truth there is in this view, it is apparent from 

[201] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

what has been already said, that it is not equal to the depth 
and subtlety of the facts. Nature is not merely the stage 
of the moral life, but in some sense its soil. The moral life 
is not merely transacted in the face of nature, it is rooted 
in it, and grows up in profound and vital relations to it. 
The nature which is absolutely separated from the spiritual 
life — which does nothing but confront it in serene or scorn- 
ful impartiality — is not the real nature in which we live and 
move and have our being; it is one of the abstractions which 
physical science constructs for its own convenience, but which 
are apt to mislead rather than enlighten in philosophy or 
theology. The only real nature is that to which we and 
our spiritual experiences are virtually related, and our prob- 
lem is not to acquiesce in the idea of the ethical neutrality 
of nature — not to regard it as an ethical &T€ipov or indeter- 
minate quantity — but to see in it, in the last resort, the man- 
ifestation, the organ, the ally of God. It is not a hasty as- 
sumption but a more profound truth which views the world 
in this light. The universe is a system of things in which 
good can be planted and in which it will bear fruit ; it is also 
a system of things in which there is a ceaseless and unre- 
lenting reaction against evil. This view of nature is vital 
both to the doctrine of sin and to that of reconciliation. 
The natural and the spiritual worlds interpenetrate. The 
sense of their interpenetration comes out in the last words 
of which man is capable with regard either to good or evil. 
It is poignant and profound in the most solemn words of 
Scripture about sin — the wages of sin is death. It is equally 
poignant and profound in the sublime words of the Ode to 
Duty: — 

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh and strong." 

[202] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

Here we have Kant's two sublimes — the starry heaven above 
and the moral law within — fused into one, which, simply 
because it does justice to this interpenetration of the natural 
and the spiritual, transcends not only in sublimity but in 
truth all that could be felt or expressed of either nature or 
spirit taken alone. 

The importance of this for our subject is that it is only in 
this connection we can interpret the divine punishment of 
sin. In the divine government of the world under which 
we live, we have no experience of punishment analogous to 
those which human legislatures attach to crime. Such pun- 
ishments are sometimes called "positive," because they are 
not determined by the nature of things, but in a way which 
is more or less arbitrary by the will of the lawgiver. He 
appoints certain losses or sufferings to follow upon certain 
prohibited actions, and the convicted offender becomes liable 
to them. In the government of God there is nothing parallel 
to this. The divine punishment is the divine reaction against 
sin expressing itself through the whole constitution or sys- 
tem of things under which the sinner lives. Some men are 
criminals and some are not, and therefore the punishments 
of human law come on some and not upon others. But we 
cannot say that some men are sinners and some are not. All 
men are sinners, and the whole race is sinful. There is a sin 
of the world in which all individuals are involved; and the 
divine reaction against sin — or, if we speak of it in such 
language, the divine punishment of sin — extends to every 
individual man, and to the race as a whole. 

That there is such a reaction is hardly questioned, but 
there has been much disagreement as to its nature and ex- 
tent. There are those who think that it is not only sensible 
in conscience, but that it begins and ends there. When a 

[203] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

man does wrong, the bad conscience which attends upon his 
act is the divine reaction against it. It is his punishment, 
and all his punishment, and such an extension of this thought 
as would regard any reaction in the physical world as also 
penal, or as revealing or constituting part of the reality of 
sin for God, is a mistake. A bad conscience may, no doubt, 
cast a shadow on every good and distil poison into every 
pain, but nothing external as such is penal. Now no one 
would willingly make light of conscience, and its power to 
punish sin is a commonplace of moralists which it is super- 
fluous to illustrate. But in spite of its plausibility, the idea 
that punishment, in the sense of the divine reaction 
against sin, is limited to conscience is both equivocal and 
untrue. 

It is equivocal because conscience, if it may be so put, is 
not limited to itself. As has been pointed out already, a bad 
conscience is something which has effects on man's nature 
in the largest sense of the term. It dulls the moral intelli- 
gence, it paralyses the moral energies. These consequences 
of sin, which are involved in the divine reaction against it, 
are not doubt realised through conscience, but they are not 
identical with it. They would be there, whether they came 
into conscience (or consciousness) or not. But the untruth 
of the idea which limits the divine reaction against sin to 
the area of conscience is apparent when we consider that 
man's moral nature has developed on the basis of nature as 
a whole, and cannot be treated as if it had no vital or organic 
relations to it. It is a mere fancy that conscience can be 
insulated, or ever operates as if it were. On the contrary, 
the inmost conviction of conscience itself is the conviction 
that the natural and the moral world are one, and that the 
universe is in arms against the sinner. The fact that the 

[204] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

bad conscience in its panic gives expression to this convic- 
tion in arbitrary and capricious forms is no argument against 
its truth. 

"Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; 
The thief doth fear each bush an officer." 

The thief is mistaken, of course, when he takes the bush for 
a policeman; but he is not mistaken in his feeling that the 
world is no longer with him but against him. Conscience, if 
we will, is the weakest of all restraints, but it can summon 
to its reinforcement all the powers and terrors of nature. 

"Methought the billows spoke and told me of it; 
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, 
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced 
The name of Prosper." 

Wordsworth, who, in the lines quoted above, has given utter- 
ance to the very truth itself in words of deathless sublimity 
and beauty, narrates in the Prelude some escapades of his 
boyhood which illustrate its instinctive action in an imagina- 
tive and sensitive spirit. On one occasion he had appro- 
priated the birds caught in another boy's snare; 

"And when the deed was done, 
I heard among the solitary hills 
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds 
Of undistinguishable motion, steps 
Almost as silent as the turf they trod." 

On another, he took the loan of a boat without asking leave 

of the owner, and rowed out on the lake. There was an 

immediate reaction through conscience both within and 

without. 

"It was an act of stealth 
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice 
Of mountain echoes did my boat move on." 

[205] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

The reaction became more intense and terrifying as he per- 
sisted in his troubled pleasure. 

"She was an elfin pinnace ; lustily 
I dipped my oars into the silent lake, 
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat 
Went heaving through the water like a swan; 
When, from behind that craggy steep, till then 
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, 
As if with voluntary power instinct 
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, 
And growing still in stature the grim shape 
Towered up between me and the stars, and still, 
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own 
And measured motion like a living thing, 
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, 
And through the silent waters stole my way 
Back to the covert of the willow tree ; 
There in her mooring-place I left my bark — 
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave 
And serious mood; but after I had seen 
That spectacle, for many days, my brain 
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense 
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts 
There hung a darkness, call it solitude 
Or blank desertion." 



If we are determined to be rationalists, we may smile at 
the superstitious terrors of the child, but nature is even more 
determined than any resolve of ours, and may be depended 
upon to confound rationalism precisely at this point. It is 
not educating a child morally to deliver him from such 
superstitions; on the contrary, it is only through such super- 
stitions, to call them so, that deep and ineffaceable moral 
impressions are made on the nature of man. What really 
terrified the boy Wordsworth was not Langdale Pike, re- 
garded merely as a mass of stone, but the "dim and unde- 

[206] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

termined sense" that all nature was the expression of the 
same power which made itself felt in the inward trouble 
the moment he took the boat, and was therefore in arms 
against him as long as he was in the wrong; and though 
this took a form determined by circumstances and by an 
imaginative temperament, and not to be verified by science, 
it was essentially right and true. Indeed it is not too much 
to say that it was not merely a truth to Wordsworth, but the 
truth which made him the poet and philosopher he was. 
And it is not against its truth that it can only be illustrated 
by reference to poetry. "I myself," says HofTding, "occupy 
a standpoint from which the fact that the poetic form is 
the only possible one is a sign that we are in the presence 
of the highest." 1 

If the punishment of sin under the divine government 
is not "positive," but comes in the form of the reaction 
against sin of the whole order under which we live — a re- 
action instinctively appreciated by conscience — it is clear that 
many of the questions discussed in connection with the Chris- 
tian doctrine of reconciliation, as to the nature and purpose 
of punishment, are irrelevant. Starting from the idea of 
criminal law and the punishment it inflicts, and looking 
especially to its history and the gradual process by which 
it has been humanised, an argument a fortiori is often ap- 
plied to the government of God with the intention of ex- 
cluding from it any such idea as that of retribution. If we 
who are evil are learning at last that retribution does no 
good, and that punishment should not be vindicative or vin- 
dictive, but educative, disciplinary, reformatory, much more 
may we assume that this will be the character of all pun- 
ishments under the government of God. But we cannot com- 

*H6ffding, Philosophy of Religion (English translation), p. 207. 

[207] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

pare in this way the positive punishments instituted and in- 
flicted by human society with the inevitable reactions of the 
divine order against evil. The latter are not positive; they 
are in the strict sense reactions. They are the sin itself 
coming back in another form and finding out the sinner. 
They are nothing if not retributive. That does not prevent 
them from being disciplinary or reformatory; on the con- 
trary, their whole power to correct or to educate depends 
on the fact that they are retributive. A penalty which is 
only connected with sin through a good intention of the 
legislator to benefit the criminal is connected with it in a 
way of which the criminal may never become conscious, 
and which might do him no good if he did ; the only punish- 
ment which has the promise of beneficial results in it — the 
only one which in the nature of things can have a remedial 
virtue — is that which is the natural, inevitable, divine re- 
action of the sin itself. In other words, the only hopeful 
penalty is that in which the sin finds out the sinner and 
makes him see all that it means; the only way of salvation 
here, as always, is through the truth. The one fact which 
penologists seem to be agreed upon does bring the human 
administration of criminal justice into a certain analogy with 
the divine. It is apparently accepted among them that what 
really prevents crime is not the severity of punishment, but 
the certainty of detection. Now just in proportion as de- 
tection is certain, a human government is assimilated to that 
of God. Under the divine rule, the reaction is inevitable: 
man can be sure his sin will find him out; retribution is as 
certain as wrong. But under ordinary human administration 
the reaction is not inevitable. The offender may never be 
found out, and if he is, he may be unable to see in his pun- 
ishment anything that belongs to his sin; it may appear ar- 

[208] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

bitrary, cruel, absurd; anything but retributive, or his sin 
in another form. Ordinary legal punishments — the sentences 
of the criminal courts — do little good to the criminals, not 
because they are purely retributive, but because they are 
hardly retributive at all. The conscience of the offender 
is not on their side; he does not feel instinctively, "This is 
what I was doing," and consequently he has no motive for 
doing otherwise. In his sentence, it is not his sin which has 
come back to him to show him all it is; it is just a cursed 
spite which has befallen him, from which others, worse than 
he, have had the luck to escape. The more, by securing in- 
fallible detection, we can assimilate human to divine methods 
of reacting against sin — in other words, the more we can 
make our legal penalties in the proper sense retributive, the 
recoil of the sinful act — the more it will be possible to look 
for disciplinary or educative results to follow from them. 
But benevolence which seeks to secure its ends by evading 
the idea of retribution seeks to attain apart from conscience 
that which cannot even be conceived except through con- 
science. 

The fact that there is, in the whole constitution of things 
under which we live, an incessant reaction against evil is 
one which cannot be proved, so to speak, by adducing evi- 
dence from without. It is one our assurance of which is 
identical with our faith in God, or our possessing or being 
possessed by a conscience; apart from it, the very concep- 
tion of the world as the scene of moral government or moral 
education would be impossible. The final form in which 
Scripture gives expression to this assurance is "the wages 
of sin is death." The reaction against evil is persistent, in- 
exorable, absolute; when it goes on to the end, this is the 
end. Sin is something which is finally repelled by God. 

[209] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Part of its reality, of what it essentially is, remains unknown 
till this is recognised. Sin is essentially a thing against which 
an annihilating sentence of God lies. Those who identify 
themselves with it come under the sentence. The end of 
such things — of the doings of the sinful life- — is death. 

This Biblical and experimental doctrine has been much 
misunderstood. It is not natural science, though it has some- 
times been taken as if it were. There is a phenomenon known 
to biologists as death, and it is a legitimate subject of in- 
quiry for them to ask what it is and what is its origin. But 
it would be no answer to any question they ask to say that 
death was due to sin — that a physical phenomenon had noth- 
ing but a moral antecedent. As far as we can see, death 
in the sense of the biologist is part of the mechanism of 
what we call life; it is an essential wheel in the course of 
nature, and we can conceive no natural system, no system 
of birth and growth, in which decay and death should not 
also have their place. But to assert this without qualifica- 
tion does not touch the certainty that nature is so consti- 
tuted as to react ceaselessly, inexorably, and at. last fatally, 
against evil. It was not sin that introduced death, in the 
sense of biology, into the world — though it is plausible to 
say that this was in Paul's mind when he wrote Romans v. 
12 fT.; nevertheless, sin is fatal to man, and that is what 
is meant by saying that the wages of it is death. 

Further, if this Bible doctrine is not natural science, neither 
is it mythology. At all events, it is not mythology if we 
mean by that term the answers which the human mind gives 
to scientific questions before it has any scientific method 
of finding the true answers. We can easily imagine that 
primitive man was awed by the mysterious fact of death, 
and questioned dimly how it came to be, and it is not hard 

[210] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

to conceive that they answered it by a mythical story of 
some god or gods who had attached this penalty to some 
arbitrary transgression of their will. But no sympathetic 
and intelligent reader of the story in the third chapter of 
Genesis would say that this answers to the intention of the 
writer. The moral significance of the story is far too won- 
derful and profound. There is too great a sum of tragic moral 
experiences beneath it to comfort with such a comparatively 
childish rendering. It is not the origin of death the author 
is interested in, but the origin of evil; this involves death, 
indeed, but only because evil cannot dwell with God. It is 
repelled and inexorably repelled from Him with whom alone 
is the fountain of life. 

Probably a certain amount of difficulty has attached to 
this subject from the modern habit of distinguishing various 
senses of death, and looking at these as if they were inde- 
pendent entities. Thus it is common to speak of "physical" 
death, or death in the sense of the biologist, and to argue 
that this has no relation to sin. This has just been admitted, 
but it must be pointed out that when we come to speak of 
man, who is a spiritual being, there is no such thing as merely 
physical death. Even in the case of creatures which have 
been intimately associated with man — domesticated and 
taken in a measure into the human family — the term ceases 
to be appropriate. The death of a pet canary is not a "merely 
physical" event, and when we know all that the doctor puts 
into the death certificate, we know very little about the death 
of a man. The Bible does not draw our distinctions. It 
does not speak about physical death at all. It knows that 
for man death is not an event only, but an experience, and 
that it depends on the man who dies what kind of experience 
it shall be. It is one of the signal mercies of God to sinful 

[211] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

men that, though sin is fatal, He enables men to win 
victory over death even in dying. They can die as heroes, 
as saints, as martyrs. But there is no such victory over 
death which is not at the same time a victory over sin, and 
that is part of the proof of an intimate connection between 
the two. We do not vanquish death by reducing it in our 
minds to something merely "physical" — in other words, by 
reducing ourselves pro tanto to the level of animals and dis- 
charging the debt of nature as animals do, which have no 
conscience of sin. We vanquish it only as sin is transcended 
in reconciliation, and in the power of the spirit of Jesus. 
This does not refute but confirm the truth that death is the 
only expression we have for the culmination of the divine 
reaction against sin. All that is works ceaselessly for its 
destruction and for the destruction of all who are identified 
with it. This is part of what sin is in the mind and world 
of God. 

Many of the difficulties connected with the ideas of sin 
and punishment in the divine order are due to the fact that 
men have essayed to interpret God's providential govern- 
ment, and to read character through circumstances, with a 
precision which no calculus at our command enables us to 
attain. To say that there is a divine reaction against evil 
tempts the naive and inexperienced mind to say that wherever 
there is suffering there is sin. The appearance of physical 
evil is an index of the presence of moral evil; if the moral 
evil is as yet concealed it will nevertheless one day be 
brought to light. It was not enough to say, with the book 
of Wisdom (xvi. 24), "The creation, ministering to thee its 
Maker, straineth its force against the unrighteous for pun- 
ishment, and slackeneth it in behalf of them that trust in 
thee for beneficence"; the truth was applied as if it meant 

[212] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

that all the pain, disease, or disaster by which the type of 
this or that individual was attended were the immediate reflex 
or counterpart of his individual guilt. The depth to which 
this mode of thought had penetrated is shown by the fact 
that the necessary protest against it evoked the sublimest 
work in all literature, the Book of Job. Job is in essence 
a protest, but while it is a magnificent vindication of the 
place of agnosticism in the true religion, it cannot be ap- 
pealed to against the general truth which is here asserted. 
Job cannot find the moral interpretation of his own sufferings 
and sorrows, and he will not allow his friends to put an inter- 
pretation on them at which his integrity revolts : that is all. 
When the same problem was brought before our Lord, he 
expressed himself variously, according to circumstances. That 
there were cases in which the connection between sin and 
the divine reaction against it was traceable He evidently al- 
lowed, as when He said to the impotent man whom He cured, 
"Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee" (John. v. 
14). That there were cases in which it is presumptuous and 
uncharitable so to judge is proved by His answer to the dis- 
ciples' question : "Who did sin, this man or his parents, that 
he should be born blind*?" "Neither," He said, "did this man 
sin nor his parents, but [he is lying here blind] that the works 
of God may be manifested in him" (John ix. 2). In a sense, 
this is only a rebuke to the disciples. We are inhuman, if 
a man suffering from blindness is nothing to us but an occa- 
sion for speculating on the connection between physical and 
moral evil ; what such a spectacle calls for, according to Jesus, 
is the manifestation of the works of God on the blind; we 
must open his eyes for him, or, if that is beyond our power, 
do him such services as he requires and we can render. But 
though this is the burden of Jesus' answer, the form in which 

[213] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

it is expressed suggests another reflection. "Who did sin," 
the disciples asked, "this man or his parents?" The answer 
implies that the question is put too narrowly and too simply. 
The moral problems raised by the state of an individual can- 
not be answered if our vision is limited to him and to his 
parents. The human race is one, and there is no answer — 
no complete answer — to problems arising out of the indi- 
vidual life until we take into account the common sin of the 
race, the universal divine reaction against it, and also the 
redemptive will of God as illustrated here by Jesus when 
He restored the man's sight. We have no calculus for work- 
ing out the problems involved in any particular case. 
What human suffering ought always to prompt in the first 
instance is help, not the investigation of character or a ver- 
dict upon it, and just as little general speculations on the 
relation of physical to moral evil. But we may recognise 
all this without modifying our conviction that there is in 
the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has 
had its perfect work is fatal, that this reaction is the divine 
punishment of sin, and that its finally fatal character is 
what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of 
sin is death. 

Modern theologians have generally been cautious, not to 
say timid, in their attitude to this question. Their tendency 
has been to say that strictly speaking nothing but the con- 
sciousness of guilt is a divine punishment. Other "evils" 
may be described as penal if we are compelled by our own 
conscience so to consider them, but we are never in a posi- 
tion to extend to others and their fortunes the kind of moral 
verdict which we may be compelled to pronounce against 
ourselves. The danger in this is that when we acknowledge 
our inability to pass judgment in the case of others as to the 

[214] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

connection between physical and moral evil, and when we 
admit, as we are bound to do, the fallibility of our verdict 
on such connection even in our own case, we are apt to fall 
unconsciously towards the view that after all the connection 
is a matter of more or less doubtful interpretation, and that 
in any event it has only subjective, not objective, validity. 
But this is a thoroughly false view. Conscience is not sub- 
jective; it is the most objective and independent authority 
of which we have any knowledge, and its very being would 
be denied if we questioned the objectivity of a divine reaction 
against evil pervading the whole nature of things. In any 
given case, his own or another's, a man may misread the 
reaction; he may see the resentment of God where it is not, 
and fail to see it where it ought to be felt; but as long as 
his conscience is alive he cannot question the objectivity of 
the reaction itself. He certainly cannot be made to feel 
that he is being punished except through his conscience. It 
is through his conscience that he belongs to the moral world 
and can conceive such an idea as that of punishment; but 
though it is true to say that all punishment is through con- 
science, it is quite unreal to say that it is limited to con- 
science. The divine reaction against sin is instinctively 
understood by conscience, but in itself it is independent of 
it, and it may be most powerful and inexorable when the 
conscience is seared and unconscious of it. It is part of 
what sin is for God whether any given sinner understands 
it as such or not. 

To be born human is to be born into vital and organic 
relation to the human race, and to that whole system of 
nature on the basis of which humanity has been evolved. 
It is to be born into a state in which the need of redemption 
and reconciliation is a universal and urgent need. We do 

[215] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

not require to ask or answer any questions about Adam and 
his fall; that moral evil is present in the race, that it is 
diffused through all its members, that there is a divine 
reaction against it, ceaseless and uncompromising, are facts 
independent of our knowledge or ignorance of the first man. 
Being what they are, they create for us the need of redemp- 
tion and reconciliation. Of course we are not conscious of 
this need except as we come to years of moral maturity, 
and serve ourselves heirs, by voluntary acts, to the damnosa 
haereditas which is ours as members of the human race. All 
the difficulties of this doctrine, and all that can be advanced 
in mitigation of them, are concentrated if we say that the 
damnosa haereditas is ours as members of the human race, 
and yet is not ours, or not fully ours, till by free action we 
make it our own. We have no means of solving these diffi- 
culties, because we have no means of tracing a process by 
which merely animal rises into conscious life, or merely 
rational into moral intelligence. The perplexities and in- 
credibilities of all Church doctrines about the salvation of 
infants are due to the refusal to recognise the limitation of 
our faculties here, and the determination to have articulate 
answers to all questions arising out of a system. The orthodox 
systems, Catholic and Protestant, emphasised the idea that 
the damnosa haereditas was ours by birth; we inherited it 
apart from any action of our own; simply by being born 
into the human race we were born lost souls. This was a 
hard saying when it had to be applied to those who were 
not only born but died before the moral nature could declare 
itself. The doctrine that the baptism of infants cleanses them 
from the sin into which they are born as members of the 
human race, and so secures their salvation, spares the feelings 
of those who can believe it, and who can close their minds 

[216] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

to the thought of the infinitely greater number who die un- 
baptized, and who according to the Romish doctrine are 
damned, though it is with a damnatio mitissima^ a poena 
damni, not sensus; but who that has part in the intellectual 
life of the world to-day can believe it 4 ? Our mental and 
moral perplexities are not to be got rid of now by barefaced 
magic. Just as little are we helped by such an expression 
as that in the Westminster Confession (c. x. iii.) : "Elect 
infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by 
Christ through the Spirit, w r ho worketh when, and where, and 
how he pleaseth." On the logical principle that the excep- 
tion proves the rule, the specification of "elect" infants here 
implies that infants are not as such elect; it is only when 
elect that they are regenerated and saved. But apart from 
this, to introduce election or predestination into the course 
of a moral argument is to dismiss argument altogether. 
The salvation of infants is just as much a blank mystery to 
the Westminster Assembly with its doctrine of election as 
to the Council of Trent with its regenerating sacrament; 
predestination in the one case and magic in the other are 
but different ways of marking the limit at which intelligence 
gives way. The wise course is to confess that there are 
questions here which we cannot answer. No doubt our 
mature moral life is continuous with the life of infancy, but 
it is not identical with it, and it is our mature moral life 
with which we have to do. All adult human beings have ♦ 
identified themselves by free acts of their own with the sin 
of the world; not only by birth but by choice they are in- 
corporated in a system of things in which evil is omnipresent, 
and in which God is ceaselessly reacting against it. It is 
in this situation that the need of reconciliation becomes 
sensible, and that we cry "What must I do to be saved? 

[217] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?" And 
it is not too much to say, even at this stage, that as we so 
cry we become conscious that the essence of salvation and 
deliverance is reconciliation. It is in the restoration of a 
right relation to God that all promise for our future lies. 
It is not meant that we can anticipate in our sin what the 
divine way of deliverance will be, but only that there is 
something in our necessities to which the way of deliverance 
must appeal and which is therefore prepared to understand 
and appreciate it. In the last resort, nothing reconciles 
but love, and what the soul, which has been alienated from 
God by sin and is suffering under the divine reaction against 
it, needs is the manifestation of a love which can assure it 
that neither the sin itself nor the soul's condemnation of it, 
nor even the divine reaction against it culminating in death, 
is the last reality in the universe ; the last reality is rather 
love itself, making our sin its own in all its reality, submitting 
as one with us to all the divine reactions against it, and 
loving us to the end through it, and in spite of it. Recon- 
ciliation is achieved when such a love is manifested, and 
when, in spite of guilt, distrust, and fear, it wins the confi- 
dence of the sinful. 

There are two questions which inevitably arise when we 
think of sin as constituting the need for reconciliation. One 
is the question whether there is any kind or degree of sin 
which precludes reconciliation because it lies beyond the 
limits of forgiveness. In all that has been already said of 
the consciousness of sin it has been assumed — it has at some 
points been expressly affirmed — that sin is not one and the 
same with human nature. In the heart of the sinner generally 
— in the heart of humanity as a whole, if one may use such 
an expression — there is not only the consciousness of sin, 

[218] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

but a resentment of it, a protest against it, a real even if it 
be an ineffectual longing for deliverance from it. Where 
there is such a longing, resentment, and protest, for grace 
to appeal to, the question does not arise. God has not left 
Himself without a witness in the sinful heart, and His witness 
is being heard. The way to reconciliation is not closed. It 
is putting the question in another form if we ask whether 
there are sinful states in which the inward witness for God 
in the soul has been finally stifled, so that there is nothing in 
the sinner to which God can appeal. No one would willingly 
answer this question in the affirmative a priori, and if we 
tried to answer it on the basis of experience we should have 
to admit that no experience of ours was adequate to pro- 
vide the answer required. We may have known astounding 
instances of human sin, but perhaps also instances as astound- 
ing of God's winning just such sinners for Himself. 

But we are bound to remember that there is no physical 
necessity of salvation, and that the longer evil is persisted in 
the greater is the difficulty with which it is overcome. The 
potter, to use Jeremiah's figure, if the vessel is marred in 
his hand, can put it on the wheel again and fashion it anew ; 
but if the clay has been through the furnace, it is past re- 
modelling; he can only shatter it irremediably (Jer. cc. xviii. 
and xix.). There are aggravations of guilt which tend to 
make forgiveness doubtful and even desperate. Sins of 
sensuality and profanity when associated with religion 
come under this head. "I have sworn unto the house of 
Eli that the iniquity of Eli's house shall not be purged 
with sacrifice nor offering for ever" ( l Sam. iii. 14). So does 
the sin of insensibility or indifference to the voice of God 
in a time of moral crisis. "In that day did the Lord, the 
Lord of hosts, call to weeping and to mourning and to bald- 

[219] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

ness and to girding with sackcloth; and behold, joy and 
gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and 
drinking wine: let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall 
die. And the Lord of hosts revealed himself in mine ears, 
Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, 
saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts" (Is. xxii. 12-14). Passages 
like these are not infrequent in the prophets, yet it is hardly 
possible to make them the basis of doctrine; they rather 
exhibit the heinousness of sin under special circumstances, 
and the intensity, in these circumstances, of the divine 
repulsion of it, than tell us whether any sin, and if so what 
sort of sin, is absolutely unpardonable. 

Neither can we base much immediately on the distinction 
drawn in the Old Testament law between sins of ignorance 
or inadvertence (sinning rwjBfc) for which atonement could 
be made and forgiveness obtained, and presumptuous sins 
(sinning with a high hand, nm TS) t the perpetrator of 
which was to be inexorably cut off from his people (Num. 
xv. 22-31). This distinction is not indeed without religious 
or theological import, but it is applicable in the first instance 
only within the sphere of Israel's national life. It means 
that violations of the law in certain cases were not fatal or 
irremediable, while in other cases they were; but it does 
not mean that in these last cases the breach of the law, 
defiant or presumptuous as it might be, was for God an 
absolutely unpardonable sin. Yet the distinction was present 
to the mind of some New Testament writers who evidently 
felt that something analogous to it might emerge under the 
Christian dispensation. We find "ignorance" made a plea 
for mercy. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do" (Luke xxiii. 34). "I wot that through ignorance 
ye did it, as did also your rulers" (Acts iii. 17). In both 

[220] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

these cases the reference is to the crucifixion, in which sin, 
we might have been disposed to say, showed itself exceeding 
sinful, guilty with a guilt which nothing could excuse or 
attenuate. If what was done by Caiaphas and Herod and 
Pilate can in any way have the benefit of the plea of "igno- 
rance," is there any sin which can be excluded from that bene- 
fit*? All the people who had responsibility in connection with 
the death of Jesus knew something of what they were doing, 
or they would have had no guilt and no need of forgiveness. 
But they did not know everything, or their guilt would have 
been final, and forgiveness impossible. It is remarkable 
that unpardonable sin in the New Testament is always 
represented as sin against Christ, and against God's salva- 
tion as present in Him. This holds, for example, of that 
sin against the Holy Spirit, which, according to the word 
of Jesus, has forgiveness neither in this world nor in that 
which is to come (Mark iii. 28-30; Matt. xii. 31 f.). For the 
Holy Spirit in this passage is the power of God actually 
at work in Jesus delivering men from the tyranny of evil; 
if a man deliberately misinterprets and maligns this, he has 
rejected God's final appeal to our race, and has no hope left. 
The same reflection may be made on the passages in Hebrews 
which deal with a fatal form of sin. The sinners are in the 
first passage (c. vi. 4-6), those who after having proved the 
blessings of the Christian dispensation, "crucify to them- 
selves the Son of God afresh and put him to an open shame." 
They are apostates from the gospel, and their sin is the 
deliberate and heartless rejection of the Saviour after a 
real experience of His power. It does not need to be proved 
that the deliberate rejection of Christ is unpardonable; it 
is in point of fact the deliberate rejection of pardon, for it 
is in Him that we have our redemption through His blood, 

[221] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

even the forgiveness of our trespasses. The other passage 
in Hebrews (x. 28 f.) is in the same key. "If he who set at 
naught Moses' law died without mercy on the word of two or 
three witnesses, of how much sorer punishment shall he be 
thought worthy, who has trodden under foot the Son of 
God, and counted the covenant blood in which he was con- 
secrated a profane thing, and done despite to the Spirit of 
grace?" The sin is deliberate and wanton, and it is a sin 
against Christ and His Passion; it is fatal and beyond 
forgiveness, simply because it is a contemptuous rejection 
of the very way of forgiveness. This is probably the key 
to the passage in the first epistle of John (c. v. 16 f.) in which 
the distinction is drawn between sin unto death and sin 
which is not unto death. The latter is the incidental sin 
into which any Christian may be surprised, and for which 
we have an advocate with the Father — an advocate in whose 
intercession for the sinner the brethren are here exhorted 
to join; the former — the sin unto death — must be some 
mode of that denial of the Son on which the apostle lays 
such stress throughout the epistle, and which carries with 
it, ipso facto, exclusion from the life eternal which is in Him. 
The consideration of these passages taken collectively 
seems to favour the view of Ritschl, that in the sense of the 
New Testament all sins are sins of ignorance except the 
final and obdurate rejection of Christ. The sins of those 
who are saved never go beyond the degree of infirmity, and 
in the full and absolute sense sin can only be committed 
against the Christian salvation. 1 What we need to guard 
against in this statement is the impression it is apt to leave, 
that because sin is pardonable it is not serious — as if nothing 
were serious but final damnation. Ritschl's doctrine is not 

1 Rechtfertigung und Versohnung, iii. § 43. 

[222] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

misrepresented if we say that according to him the sins 
which can be and actually are pardoned are not properly 
sins at all — they are ayvoiai. or inadvertences, for which 
forgiveness is a matter of course; while when we come to 
what really is sin, an offence against the Christian salvation, 
there is no such thing as forgiveness conceivable. To exclude 
such inferences we require a definition of sin which shall be 
applicable to sins of ignorance as well as to the unpardon- 
able sin, and shall not extenuate sin's seriousness at every 
stage but the last. It is unreal to define sin by relation to 
an original righteousness which is inaccessible, and it is not 
adequate to define it simply by relation to Christ and His 
salvation, for then it is defined in a way by which salvation 
from it is precluded. We must think of it as something 
which emerges and asserts its character at all stages or 
levels of human life; something from which at every stage 
we need to be delivered, and from which we cannot at 
any stage deliver ourselves. In the words of the Shorter 
Catechism, we must conceive it as any want of conformity 
unto or transgression of the law of God; it is moral evil, 
or unfaithfulness to the moral ideal, regarded in its relation 
to God. The moral ideal, it will no doubt be said, varies; 
different people have different ideas of what is God's will. 
That is quite true, but it only means that there are differences 
of endowment and of privilege in men; it does not affect 
the truth that at every stage of our life we have the respon- 
sibility of subordinating that life to moral ends which for 
us have absolute authority. The law of God is not a statute; 
it is an ideal which defines itself through conscience in a 
form appropriate to each successive moment of our exist- 
ence ; and the obligation of it, as so defined, is never less than 
unconditional. We ought not to do any wrong for the world. 

[223] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

We ought to die rather than do any wrong whatever. It is as 
truly sin to neglect the duty of the moment as finally to turn 
one's back on Christ and His salvation. In this respect sin 
is death— any sin, and not only the unpardonable sin of 
which the New Testament speaks. It is deadly until it is 
repented of and forgiven; whereas the other is deadly in 
the sense that in its very nature it excludes repentance and 
forgiveness. It belongs to a true estimate of redemption 
and reconciliation to apprehend all sin in all its seriousness. 
The Ritschlian elaboration of the contrast between sins of 
ignorance and the unpardonable sin tends, in the writer's 
opinion, to reduce the former to a sort of insignificance; and 
when the sins which can be atoned for are generically not 
fatal, the shadow of insignificance readily falls on the atone- 
ment itself. 

The second question to be raised in connection with sin 
and reconciliation is how far the consequences of sin are 
reversible when the sinner is reconciled to God. It would 
be easy to answer the question if we assumed that the con- 
sequences are to be traced in conscience alone. In this case 
these consequences would simply disappear. There is no 
condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. In the 
overpowering sense of God's love in Christ distrust and fear 
vanish away. But this is not the view which has been taken 
of the subject in these lectures: the reaction of God against 
sin, it has been argued, is a reaction through the whole 
system of things in which we live; nature as well as con- 
science is involved in it; there are relations of physical and 
moral evil which we may not be able to define in particular 
cases, but which on the whole it is impossible to deny. Now, 
that the natural consequences of sin are irreversible is a 
commonplace of moralists. It has a plausible support in 

[224] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

the words of Scripture: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that 
shall he also reap" (Gal. vi. 7), and there is nothing in 
Scripture which experience more promptly confirms. But 
there are other words of Scripture, and other experiences 
also. "He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded 
us according to our iniquities" (Ps. ciii. 10). "I will restore 
to you the years that the locust hath eaten" (Joel ii. 25). 
Irreversibleness holds true of all consequences in that abstract 
nature with which the physical deals, but how far it is true 
of nature entering as a constituent into a moral system is 
a question which no one can answer beforehand. There are 
healing as well as fatal reactions in nature, and the change 
in the soul's relation to God through reconciliation is a change 
so profound that we should anticipate far-reaching rever- 
berations of it even in the natural world. This anticipation 
is encouraged in the New Testament. The work of Christ 
is not in the limited sense of the term a spiritual work: the 
bodies of men are no less His care than their souls. When 
He says to the paralytic, "Courage, child, thy sins are forgiven 
thee," He says in the same breath, "Take up thy bed and 
walk." There is only one work of redemption, one recon- 
ciling and restoring power of God in Christ, but its virtue 
extends to palsy as well as to sin. The reaction of God 
against sin through nature may be terrible and crushing; 
but His reaction against it through the Redeemer is more 
profound and wonderful. It transcends nature, in the 
sense in which science uses the term, and raises hopes which 
leave it out of sight. It holds out the prospect of a mode 
of being in which not only sin will have disappeared, but 
in which there will be no more death, neither sorrow nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain. In the world 
of reconciliation all things are made new. The pitiless idea 

[225] 



; THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

that for ever and ever even the saved will bear the scars and 
the disablements of their sin is not supported by anything 
in the New Testament, and is quite out of harmony with its 
sense of triumph in Christ. Immortality is of the essence of 
Christianity, and once we accept an idea which is so purely 
supernatural as that of immortal life, it is idle to revolt at 
the reversal of any consequences of sin on the ground that 
they are inconsistent with the laws of nature. With the 
laws of nature, in the sense of biology or physics, immor- 
tality itself is inconsistent; nature has no example of it. 
But Christians are pledged to faith in immortality, and 
though it doth not yet appear what we shall be, we believe 
that we shall wear the image of the Heavenly, and that the 
wounds of sin shall be healed till not even a scar remains. 

This, of course, does not answer the questions which can 
be raised as to the effect, here and now, of reconciliation 
upon what may be regarded as the natural consequences of 
sin. When a man recognises that in such consequences his 
sin has found him out, he recognises them as penal. They 
are the just award of his deeds, his sin returning to him in 
a new form, and showing him what it fully and really is. As 
long as the man is alienated from God they retain this char- 
acter; they are depressing, tormenting, ominous. He resents 
them, fears them, struggles against them, but his bad con- 
science, or the sense of estrangement from God underlying 
them, forbids his facing them in any mood but that of 
despair. They are tokens of a condemnation from which 
there is no appeal, and they lie with a disabling force upon 
his life. Now reconciliation makes a radical change here. 
Not that it suspends or arrests the divine reactions against 
evil which the sinner has found as distressing, but it enables 
him, in words which have been already quoted from the 

[226] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

Old Testament, to "accept" them as "the punishment of 
his iniquity" ; and, as he does so, they acquire a new virtue in 
his life. They are not a divine judgment of his sin, termi- 
nating in itself; they are part of the discipline of his Father's 
house, which has his moral advantage in view. In the 
language ordinarily employed to express this contrast, they 
have ceased to be punishment, and become chastisement. 
And if, as has been argued, the natural and the moral worlds 
are organically related in the government of God, to take 
them in the new character makes a difference in them through 
and through. The unreconciled man kicks against the 
pricks, and his punishment is made by that very fact the 
more severe. The reconciled man, bowing to the divine 
will which reacts against his sin, finds the reaction, through 
God's mercy, to be on his side; in proportion as he consents 
to bear it, he is able to do so; it finds its place among the 
things which work together for his good; he can believe 
that when it ceases to be necessary it will pass, and that 
in the world beyond death, at all events, all the pain, shame, 
and disablement which the sinful life has brought in its 
train will certainly disappear. 

The attitude taken throughout this chapter on the question 
of the divine reaction against sin will inevitably raise in some 
minds questions about the wrath of God. As has often been 
pointed out, the wrath of God in Scripture is mainly, if not 
exclusively, an eschatological idea. There is a day of wrath. 
The wrath itself is often spoken of as the wrath to come. 
Jesus is our deliverer from the wrath to come. Having 
been justified now in His blood, we shall be saved by Him 
from that wrath. What is the relation between the wrath 
of God so conceived and that ceaseless and omnipresent 
divine reaction against evil on which we have hitherto in- 

[22 7 ] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

sisted? There is undoubtedly a connection between them. 
Apart from present experiences to which we can attach the 
idea of a divine wrath — a divine resentment and repulsion 
of evil — we could attach no meaning to a wrath of God which 
was merely eschatological. There is no such thing as a 
future which is not the future of the present. The key to 
everything in the future — even to the future and final wrath 
of God — must be found in the present. The divine reaction 
against evil, of which we are conscious now, is continuous 
with the coming wrath, but it is not identical with it. It 
prophesies that the wages of sin is death, and in the day of 
wrath the prophecy is fulfilled for those who have identified 
themselves with sin to the last. The wrath of God which 
awaits the finally impenitent makes its weight felt even now 
upon all who live in sin. The sum of the divine reactions 
against evil in the human race is the wrath of God so far as 
yet revealed; working, so to speak, from behind a screen; 
working, in the forbearance of God, with some kind of 
self-restraint, so as to give opportunity as well as motives 
for repentance (2 Pet. iii. 9) ; but not capable of being really 
misunderstood in the conscience. In so far as it lies immersed 
in sin, the whole world lies exposed to the wrath of God; 
to live in the world, to be a member of the human race, is 
to know to that extent at least what the wrath of God means. 
We cannot evade this conclusion by arguing that the world 
is the object of God's love, and therefore cannot be the 
object of His wrath; the very task of Christian thought is 
to do justice to both ideas. The world is undoubtedly the 
object of God's love — the whole world; but it is a love 
which inexorably judges and repels evil. Our own experience 
is at one with the New Testament in revealing to us both 
these truths, and it is therefore inept to play off the one 

[228] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

against the other. It is not necessary to say they must 
be reconciled, for that assumes that there is an antagonism 
between them, but they must be recognised and combined 
in any true doctrine of sin and reconciliation. 

The old difficulty about the relation of sin and death 
emerges here in another form. If the wrath of God is 
finally revealed only in the day of wrath — if it is then only 
that we see all that sin is to God — apparently we ought to 
say, not the wages of sin is death, but the wages of sin is 
the second death, the death involved in the wrath of God, 
the death which has no life on its horizon. This, it might 
then be argued, would deprive the first death — the death 
which all men die in this world, the death which Jesus died 
on the cross — of any significance in relation to sin. Instead of 
being in some mysterious way one, sin and this death would 
have nothing to do with each other. But this would be a 
hasty conclusion. To say that sin and death have nothing 
to do with each other is to repudiate the whole argument of 
this chapter 5 that what we distinguish as the physical and 
the moral worlds are elements organically related and inter- 
penetrating each other in one divine system; and without 
repeating the argument the writer must stand by it. Not 
in the world of the physicist, and not perhaps in that of the 
moralist, but in the world of God, in which nature and spirit 
cast lights and shadows on each other and call for a common 
and continuous interpretation, death comes, and must come, 
into the divine reaction against evil. It is not only physical 
or moral, it is spiritual, prophetic, sacramental; to pass 
through it, even at peace with God, is to realise something 
which could not be realised otherwise of what sin means to 
Him. That is why death must enter into a forgiveness or 
reconciliation in which sin is not extenuated or condoned, 

[229] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

but acknowledged by the sinner as all it is to God. No 
one can ever save us who does not know what sin is, and no 
one knows w T hat it is who has not bowed to the divine reactions 
against it as far as they come upon a race which not only 
needs but remains capable of salvation. 

Up till now, in speaking of the need of reconciliation, 
account has only been taken of that need as felt by man. 
Man needs to be reconciled to God if he is not to perish 
in his sin. There is a kind of equivocation if we speak of 
reconciliation as necessary to God, yet in some sense most 
theologians have had this idea or its equivalent represented 
in their systems of thought. If man is not reconciled to 
God, it is argued, then not only does man perish in his sins, 
but God's purpose in man's creation is frustrated; He has 
made His noblest creature in vain. But this, we must 
assume, is an intolerable thought. The divine purpose must 
be carried into effect if God is to remain God, and therefore 
reconciliation is as indispensable to Him as it is to sinners 
themselves. This can be put in more naive forms, as by 
Anselm, 1 who thinks it was a matter of divine necessity that 
the number of the fallen angels should be replaced by an 
equal number of redeemed men — the angels being irremedi- 
ably lost ; or in a more philosophical form, as by Ritschl, who 
holds that the realisation of the Kingdom of God among men, 
which is unconditionally necessary, carries with it the same 
divine necessity for the reconciliation of sinners; but in no 
form does it make a very strong appeal to the Christian 
conscience. Salvation is of grace, and anything that impairs 
its absolutely gracious character raises an instinctive protest 
in the Christian spirit. The ideas just indicated cannot 
easily be expressed without seeming, at least, to compro- 

1 Vide Riviere, Etude theologique, pp. 348 ff. 

[230] 



THE NEED OF RECONCILIATION 

mise the freeness of God's reconciling love. They lay a 
necessity on Him at the very point at which the Christian 
spirit requires to contemplate Him as free, If it be replied 
that the necessity is one of the kind which is identical with 
freedom — the work of reconciliation arising out of what 
God is, and being therefore at once free and inevitable — it 
must be answered that the necessity that God should act 
in accordance with His true character, and the necessity 
that His design in creating man should not be frustrated, 
are not identical ; they do not make the same appeal either 
to the intellect or to the emotions of man. Further, the 
logic of the argument leads inevitably either to the conclu- 
sion that all men must be saved, if God's purpose in creating 
them is not to be defeated, or that God's purpose in creating 
man included only the salvation of some. But neither 
universalism nor a particular predestination carries its own 
evidence to the Christian conscience. Both indeed reason 
about the moral world as if it were not a moral world at 
all, as if it could have all its riddles read a priori by the 
use of abstract categories which leave its reality untouched. 
The Christian conscience does not dwell on the fact that, 
being what He is, God must reconcile man to Himself, and 
can therefore be said to need reconciliation as well as the 
sinner: its final utterance is that of adoring amazement: 
"Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed 
upon us." A theology which is out of tune with this is 
beside the mark. 

It is more legitimate to insist that once the freeness of 
God's reconciling love has been recognised, a necessity of 
some kind attaches to the mode of its manifestation. To 
be real, and to stand in a real relation to the necessities of 
sinners, his love must appear in a fashion determined by these 

l>3i] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

necessities. To save a drowning man you want a rope, to 
save a starving man a loaf, to save a sick man a medicine; 
and to save a man involved with a bad conscience in the 
divine reaction against the world's sin, you need a manifesta- 
tion of help which has a necessary adaptation to his case. 
It is here indeed, when we speak of the method of salvation, 
that the proper place appears for emphasising necessity in 
connection with God's work as Reconciler. It is misleading, 
to say the least, to preach that God must save men, because 
He cannot see His purposes frustrated; but it is in keeping 
both with Scripture and with Christian conscience to teach 
that, given the free unmerited reconciling love of God, the 
circumstances of man, or, if we prefer to put it so, the rela- 
tions between God and man, necessitate its manifestation 
having one character and not another. It is in the inter- 
pretation of this secondary kind of necessity that we deal 
with the doctrine of reconciliation in the proper sense of 
the term. And even so, we cannot deal with it a priori. 



InA 



CHAPTER V 

RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

The need of reconciliation, in the only sense in which the 
term "need" can properly be used in this connection, lies, as 
we have now seen, in man, and in his relation to God as 
affected by sin. The source of it, as Scripture and experience 
combine to teach, is to be found purely in the love of God. 

This ultimate truth about reconciliation is not touched 
by the fact that the Christian experience of it comes to us 
through Christ. For Christ, in achieving the reconciliation 
of the world to God, is doing the work that the Father gave 
Him to do. The one term by which His work can always 
be described in relation to God is obedience. He is the 
righteous Servant of the Lord. He is in the world not to 
do His own will, but the will of Him that sent Him. He is 
not wringing favour or forgiveness for men from a God who 
is reluctant to bestow it; He is manifesting the love which 
God eternally is and eternally bears to His creatures. Neither 
does the achievement of reconciliation by Christ imply that 
there is any schism in the divine nature, as though it would 
be wrong to forgive freely, or unmerciful to treat sin as what 
it is. In the divine nature justice and mercy do not need to 
be composed, they have never fallen out. 

These universally accepted truths, however, are sometimes 
made to support questionable inferences. Thus it is argued 
that on the basis of them we must admit that the reconciling 

E>33] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

work of Christ has reference to men only, and that its mean- 
ing and virtue are exhausted in the effect it is designed to 
produce upon sinners. We must give up all that is meant 
by an objective atonement — that is, a work of Christ as 
Reconciler which tells upon God as well as upon the sinful. 
We must abandon as misleading the use of such terms as 
tXac/zos, l\a<jT7]pLov } propitiation, expiation: they are all 
tainted incurably with the idea that the Son represents 
mercy and the Father judgment, and that forgiveness has 
to be extorted, so to speak, from one to whom it is not 
natural to forgive. If we continue to speak of an "objective" 
atonement at all, it can only be in the modified — one should 
rather say the irrelevant or evasive — sense, that it is an 
atonement provided by God and not by the sinner from his 
own resources. 

Notwithstanding the volume and the emphasis of such argu- 
ment in recent times, and notwithstanding its relative justifi- 
cation in the disregard by some preachers and theologians of 
the truth that even in the work of reconciliation the Father 
and the Son are one, there is something in it which tends to 
obscure the truth about the work of Christ. The work of Christ 
is not designed to impress men simpliciter. It is designed to 
impress them to a certain intent, to a certain issue; it is 
designed to produce in them through penitence God's mind 
about sin. It cannot do this simply as an exhibition of 
unconditioned love. It can only do it as the exhibition or 
demonstration of a love which is itself ethical in character 
and looks to ethical issues. But the only love of this descrip- 
tion is love which owns the reality of sin by submitting hum- 
bly and without rebellion to the divine reaction against it; it 
is love doing homage to the divine ethical necessities which 
pervade the nature of things and the whole order in which 

[234] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

men live. These divine ethical necessities are in the strictest 
sense objective. They are independent of us, and they 
claim and receive homage from Christ in His work of recon- 
ciliation, whether that work does or does not produce upon 
men the impression which is its due. This is an objective 
atonement. It is a homage paid by Christ to the moral 
order of the world established and upheld by God ; a homage 
essential to the work of reconciliation, for unless men are 
caught into it, and made participant of it somehow, they 
cannot be reconciled ; but a homage, at the same time, which 
has value in God's sight, and therefore constitutes an objective 
atonement, whether any particular person is impressed by 
it or note Even if no man should ever say, "Thou, O Christ, 
art all I want; more than all in Thee I find," God says 
it. Christ and His work have this absolute value for the 
Father, whatever this or that individual may think of 
them; and as it is only on the basis of Christ and His work 
that reconciliation becomes an accomplished fact, it is strict 
truth to say that reconciliation — in the sense of man's return 
to God and acceptance with Him — is based on an objective 
atonement. It is because divine necessities have had homage 
done to them by Christ, that the way is open for sinners to 
return to God through Him. When they are forgiven, it is 
propter Christum as well as gratuito: it is not by uncondi- 
tioned love — an expression to which no meaning can be 
attached which does not obliterate the distinction between 
right and wrong — but by a love the very nature of which 
is that it does absolute homage to the whole being and self- 
revelation of God, and especially to the inexorable reactions 
of the divine nature against sin. 

It is a serious objection to the contrary view that it re- 
moves God from the centre of religion and puts man in His 

[235] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

place. Instead of God being man's chief end, man is made 
God's chief end. God has no raison d'etre, so to speak, but 
to look after us; the type of religion becomes hedonist 
rather than ethical: there is a loss of reverence, of awe, 
of solemn worship, of concentration on the moral life. There 
is a plausible appearance of the contrary when all the emphasis 
is laid, in the work of Christ, on the moral effect produced 
by it upon men. But this is one of many cases in religion 
in which the proverb holds, that the longest way round is the 
shortest way home. What pursues man in his sin and 
appeals to him is not love which is thinking of nothing but 
man, and is ready to ignore and to defy everything for his 
sake; it is a love which in Christ before everything does 
homage to that in God which sin has defied. No other love, 
and no love acting otherwise, can reconcile the sinner to a 
God whose inexorable repulsion of sin is witnessed to in 
conscience and in the whole reaction of the world's order 
against evil. We cannot dispense with the ideas of propitia- 
tion, IXaanos, IKaaTTjpiov: we cannot dispense with a work 
of reconciliation which is as objective as Christ Himself, 
and has its independent objective value to God, let our 
estimate of it be what it will. The world with Christ and 
His Passion in it is a different place from the world without 
Christ and His Passion in it. It is a different place to God, 
and God's attitude to it is different. Is there any other 
way to express this than by saying that Christ and His Passion 
constitute an objective atonement, and that it is on the 
basis of this that men are reconciled to God? 

It is true that in the New Testament God is never spoken 
of as the object of reconciliation. Man is reconciled to God, 
but we never read that God is reconciled to man. God is 
always the subject of the verb "to reconcile." "All things 

[236] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

are of God who hath reconciled us to Himself through Christ.'' 
"God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself." 
This is the uniform style of speech, if we can speak of uni- 
formity when we have only one or two instances to argue 
from. What underlies it, of course, is the sense that God 
takes the initiative in the work of reconciliation, that Christ 
is the gift of God, and the gift of His love. It is on this free 
gift that everything in Christianity depends. All the New 
Testament writers would have said, with Augustine, "Jam 
diligenti reconciliati sumus." But the inference sometimes 
drawn from this, that it is wrong to speak of God in the 
passive as reconciled, surely overlooks the fact that it is 
possible at the same time to love and to be justly estranged; 
yes, and at the same time also to work for the winning again 
of the offender against love. When we say that because 
God is love, immutably and eternally love, therefore He 
does not need to be and cannot be reconciled, we are imputing 
immutability to God in a sense which practically denies 
that He is the living God. If sin makes a difference to God 
— and that it does is the solemn fact which makes recon- 
ciliation of interest to us — then God is not immutable, 
and His love is not immutable, in the sense assumed. He 
has experiences in His love. To have His love wounded by 
sin is one, and to forgive sin is another. If to be forgiven 
is a real experience, so is to forgive: it makes a difference 
to God as well as to us. An earthly father's readiness to 
forgive — the fact that he is jam diligens — is not the same 
as his actual forgiveness. When he actually forgives, he 
not only loves his penitent child as he always loved him, 
but his attitude to him is changed; as a matter of fact it 
is other than it was when he was only waiting for the 
opportunity to forgive. The only natural way to express 

[237] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the difference is to say that now he is reconciled to the 
offender. No one thinks that this is inconsistent with his 
always having loved him, and if we do not think so in the 
case of an earthly father, there is no reason why we should 
make difficulty about it in the case of the Heavenly Father. 
Unchanging love is taken for granted in both cases; but 
in both cases also sin makes a difference, and so do peni- 
tence and pardon. In the experience of forgiveness, as a 
matter of fact, not only are we reconciled to God, but God 
is reconciled to us. He is not reconciled in the sense that 
something is won from Him for us against His will, but 
in the sense that His will to bless us is realised, as it was 
not before, on the basis of what Christ has done, and of 
our appropriation of it. Christian creeds of every type 
have freely expressed this without any sense that they were 
compromising the love of God. It is natural that St. Paul 
in the few places in which he speaks of reconciliation should 
make God its author and man its object; but it is not less 
natural nor less legitimate for the Christian who feels that 
he owes to Christ his experience of God's pardoning love 
to say that through Christ he possesses a reconciled God and 
Father. It is in virtue of his Christian relation to Christ 
— what this is will be considered in the next chapter — that 
God has for him the character of a reconciled, propitious, 
or gracious God; and without impugning the essential 
love of God which gave Christ to the world, he would be doing 
less than justice to the difference Christ makes, if he did 
not include in it the difference made not merely in our 
thought of God, but in God's real relation to us. There 
have, no doubt, been exaggerated and unconsidered expres- 
sions given to this, but the fact remains, and it is not easy to 
do justice to it if we repudiate sifnpliciter an objective atone- 

[238] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

ment. Reduced to its simplest expression, what an objec- 
tive atonement means is that but for Christ and His Passion 
God would not be to us what He is. This seems to the writer 
the unquestionable Christian truth. The alternative is to 
say that quite independent of any value which Christ and 
His Passion have for God, God would still be to us what 
He is. But this is really to put Christ out of Christianity 
altogether, and needs no refutation. 1 

What we have now to do is to exhibit as clearly as possible 
the content of the work of reconciliation as achieved by 
Christ. The question to be answered is not "What is Christ 
doing to reconcile men to God 4 ?" but "What did He do for 
this purpose in His life and Passion*?" In other words, we 
are concerned here with what used to be spoken of as the 
finished work of Christ. The unfinished or progressive 
work — that which is still going on in the restoration of men 
to God — is, of course, not in dispute; only, it is assumed 
that it proceeds on the basis of the other. The other, the 
finished work of Christ — what has just been described as 
the objective atonement — is precisely what is meant by 
KdTaWayri in the New Testament. 2 It is on its complete- 
ness and finality that the finality and perfection of the Chris- 
tian religion depend. It is this which justifies the evangelist 
when he says "Receive the reconciliation" (Rom. v. 11), or 
"Be reconciled to God" (2 Cor. v. 20). 

To begin with, Jesus was born into the world and the 
race in which sin and the divine reactions against it were 
the universal experience. This is not just the same as to 

1 Cf. McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, p. xxvi — "that 
divine love which, while as love it is unchanging, yet must, because of its 
very nature r ever change in the look with which it regards us according to 
our changing selves." 

3 The Death of Christ, p. 103. 

[239] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

say that He was born in our nature, or that in Him a divine 
person took humanity into hypostatic union with Himself. 
Much has been written in this sense by Catholic theologians 
both in ancient and in modern times, but except to those 
who bow without question to the authority of what is re- 
garded as orthodox tradition it is entirely unimpressive, 
and it is not the key to the problem before us. To speak 
of this taking of the human nature into union with the divine 
as the incarnation, and then to argue that the incarnation 
in this sense virtually contains the atonement, is quite unreal. 
Reconciliation is not the nature of Christ, but His task. It 
is not something which is identical with this metaphysical 
union of the human and the divine, it is something which 
has to be morally achieved. It is as a member of our race, 
sharing our nature and our lot, that Christ accomplishes 
the moral task of reconciling the world to God; but His 
being is not identical with nor a substitute for the fulfilment 
of His task. 

Strange illustrations could be given of the unreal con- 
clusions to which theologians are led who in discussing the 
atonement emphasise the value of the incarnation, in this 
bare metaphysical sense of the personal union of the human 
nature with the divine. What is apparently their inten- 
tion is to represent the hypostatic union — the incarnation, 
as they call it — as giving an infinite value to all the experi- 
ences of Jesus. But instead of giving them an infinite value, 
on their own showing it renders them superfluous. "What 
was necessary," asks M. Riviere, "that the Word incarnate 
might achieve this work of reparation?" — that is, the work 
of moral reparation in which, as he properly insists, a due 
satisfaction is made to God for sin. His answer is, "In 
principle, nothing but His presence in humanity; the least 

[240] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

of His actions had a sufficient value." 1 Elsewhere he writes : 
"Although, strictly speaking, a single act of the incarnate 
Word would have sufficed for this end" — that is, to counter- 
balance the fault of our first father, or to neutralise the 
introduction of sin into the world, with all its consequences 
in the relations of God and man — "God nevertheless has 
willed, if one may so say, to make the measure of repara- 
tion superabundant, as if the humanity had been bound 
to provide it alone" — that is, apparently, apart from the 
Word. 2 One can only say that these are extraordinary 
statements. In the interest of a dogmatic theory — the 
theory of the hypostatic union in Jesus of the human and 
the divine — the whole life and death of Jesus, as the gospels 
exhibit them, the whole story of the evangelists through 
which Jesus has lived and has exerted His reconciling power 
in the world, is pronounced in principle superfluous. It 
may be hoped that not many Christians have courage equal 
to this logic. The obvious inference from a doctrine which 
makes all that we read in the evangelists, except perhaps 
the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, in principle 
superfluous, is that that doctrine is wrong. No matter how 
well intentioned it is, no matter what pious usages have 
coalesced with it, it is wrong. Every one has encountered 
the kind of devotional utterance which this doctrine of the 
incarnation justifies and inspires. It is as common among 
Protestant pietists as among Catholics: that one drop of 
Christ's blood, one pang of His agony, one sigh of His sorrow, 
is a superabundant satisfaction for the sin of the whole 
world — in virtue of the hypostatic union. Such utterances 
stand in no relation to the realities with which we have to 

J J. Riviere, he Dogme de la Redemption: etude theologique, p. 373. 
' Ibid., p. 292. 

[241] 



V 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

deal in interpreting the reconciling work of Christ. They 
thrust into the place of these realities, which include the 
life, sufferings, and death of the Saviour, a set of fictitious 
and feeble extravagances which pall when they do not nause- 
ate. They ought to be dropped with the whole theory of the 
incarnation which implies that you can multiply the human 
by the divine, and so infinitely increase its value. There 
are no quantities in the case, and the multiplication there- 
fore has no meaning. The reconciling power of what Jesus 
did and suffered — its value alike for God and man in the 
situation in which man is estranged from God by sin and 
the world is full of divine reactions against that sin — is 
not in point of fact dependent on any idea as to the con- 
stitution of Christ's person. To say, with M. Riviere, 1 that 
the principles of a moral biography of Jesus are to be taken 
from the classical treatises on the incarnation — treatises 
in which the incarnation means the hypostatic union — is 
to turn our backs upon history and reality. The only in- 
carnation of which the New Testament knows anything is 
the appearance of Christ in the race and lot of sinful men, 
and His endurance in it to the end. Apart from sharing our 
experience, that sharing of our nature, which is sometimes 
supposed to be what is meant by incarnation, is an abstrac- 
tion and a figment. But everything in that sharing of our 
experience is essential. We dare not say that anything is 
"in principle" superfluous, and stands in the life of Jesus 
and in the story of the evangelists only because "God willed, 
if one may so say," to make the measure of reparation "super- 
abundant." This bare will of God, in which there is no prin- 
ciple and no rational or moral necessity, is really nothing 
at all, and we cannot use it to buttress an interpretation of 

1 Le Dogme de la Redemption: etude theologique, p. 289. 

[242] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

the life and death of Jesus by which they also are robbed 
of reality. Everything in the story of Jesus belongs to the 
gospel as the word of reconciliation, and everything in it 
has in principle the same meaning, necessity, and value as 
everything else. But how are we to work this out further, 
keeping in view the fundamental truth that reconciliation 
is not the nature but the task of the reconciler^ 

From the very beginning Christians have believed that 
Christ lived in our nature, and under all the conditions in 
which we have failed, an absolutely sinless life. He was 
tempted in all things like as we are, but He knew no sin 
(2 Cor. v. 21) ; to His conscience and will it remained abso- 
lutely foreign. It assailed His will, but was never able to 
obtain the slightest advantage against it. This is not the 
place to develop an argument for the sinlessness of Jesus: 
it will be enough to remark that the strength of such an 
argument would lie not in such direct assertions by others, 
as have just been quoted from Paul, but in the complete 
absence, from the self-revelation of Jesus, of anything which 
betrays on His own part the consciousness of sin. The 
importance of it in the present connection is that the sin- 
lessness which is here contemplated is contemplated as a 
moral achievement. Not as though Jesus had been born 
sinful, and overcame sin in Himself, attaining to purity 
through conflict and victory; but as a member of our race 
He had to live in a world and in a society in which sin was 
omnipresent, in which it had great bribes to offer, great 
powers of intimidation to exercise, great sufferings to inflict, 
and He won a continuous and complete victory over it by 
resisting unto blood. In spite of all the seductions and all 
the importunate pressures of sin He lived, as a member of 
our race, a life in which sin had no place and no power. 

[243] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

In doing so, it is sometimes argued, He reconciled humanity 
to God. His sinless life and death — or, to bring out more 
unambiguously the moral character of it as an achievement, 
His life and death of victory over sin — are the work of recon- 
ciliation. Ideas of this kind have probably never been strange 
to the Christian mind. No doctrine of Christ's Person can 
hide from a simple spectator the truth that He had a battle 
to fight, and that we men, in whose nature He fights it, are 
interested in His victory. Athanasius puts it with the one- 
sided emphasis on death as the enemy, rather than sin, which 
is characteristic of the Greek fathers. When all men were 
perishing because of the transgression of Adam, Christ came, 
and, by dying and rising again, won for humanity a victory 
over death. He won it in our nature, in our flesh; in Him, 
in union with the Word, our nature or flesh overcame the 
last enemy. Hence Athanasius can apply the idea of salva- 
tion to Christ Himself, and speak of His victory as something 
He achieved for Himself as well as for us. Upcorr] t&v &\Xoh>, 
he writes, ka6^dt\ koX rfKevdepudt) fj kiceivov cap!;, cbs clvtov tov 
\6yov acbpLa yevopevr}. 1 In other words, He saved human 
nature in His own person, in order that it might sub- 
sequently be saved in the persons of others. Christ 
Himself illustrates not only what it is to save, but what it 
is to be saved; indeed it is only the Christ in whom the 
human nature which He has assumed is saved who is able 
to be the Saviour. 

This point of view, however, becomes much more signi- 
ficant, when it is transposed from the metaphysical key in 
which it deals only with death to the moral one in which 
it deals with sin. Sin is regarded here, not in the first in- 
stance — indeed not directly at all — as the sin under which 

1 Athanasius, c. Arianos, ii. 61. 

[244] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

others suffer, but as a power which assails and tries to subdue 
Christ, He is in conflict with it on His own account, and 
His task is to put it under His feet. The most strenuous 
representatives of this view in modern times have been 
Menken and Du Bose. Ordinarily the human nature of 
Christ is regarded by those who take this line as identical 
with human nature in other men. It has the same latent 
possibility of sin in it, the same susceptibility to the tempta- 
tions which sin can offer, the same liability to be intimi- 
dated by the cruel power sin wields. But in Christ the 
latent possibility of sin is never allowed under any tempta- 
tion to develop or emerge in a sinful act. He was never 
bribed or coerced into doing anything which left a stain on 
His conscience, or rose as a cloud between His soul and God. 
He not only maintained a perpetual conflict against sin, 
He achieved an unbroken victory over it. He saved human 
nature in His own person : saved it in spite of all it was as 
the nature of Adam, and of all that beset it in this present 
evil world ; and in so saving human nature in His own person 
He reconciled humanity to God. It is a Christus salvus 
f actus, a Christ who is saved, who becomes Christus salvos 
fariens, Christ the Saviour. He saves Himself by His divine 
energy, resisting unto blood, striving against sin; and He 
saves us as He inspires us by His example to walk in His 
steps. 

It was a commonplace of Christian teaching a genera- 
tion ago to contrast Christ as our atonement and reconcilia- 
tion with Christ as a "mere" example; the latter was the 
Socinian, the former the evangelical view. But Christ, as 
the evangelical view sometimes led its adherents to forget, 
after all is an example ; and it is at least possible that to 
be insensible to the inspiration of His example is to lie outside 

[245] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

of His reconciling power. The emphasis laid by the writers 
just referred to on the conflict by which Christ achieved and 
maintained that perfect life which we contemplate in the 
gospels has its own justification; it keeps us in the world 
of moral reality from which our want of moral nerve is always 
tempting us to slink. Whatever reconciliation may be, it 
is something which for Christians must have the character 
and virtue of Christ in it, and everything does us a service 
which brings into fresh prominence aspects of that character 
and virtue which have been somewhat overlooked. 

But while this appreciation is due to writers like Menken 
and Du Bose, it is not possible to accept the view that Christ's 
personal victory over sin, regarded as a power tempting or 
assailing Him, is His complete work of reconciliation. Such 
a formula as that He saved human nature in His own person 
is of no value; it assumes a whole incredible philosophy 
about natures and persons, and all it means is that the man 
Christ Jesus won a perfect victory over sin. The Biblical 
support of this doctrine of reconciliation is meagre and 
dubious. Two passages are quoted in its favour from the 
epistle to the Romans, both, as Holtzmann remarked, among 
the cruces of Paulinism. The first is Rom. vi. 10: "The 
death that He [Christ] died, He died unto sin once for all." 
In ordinary circumstances when Paul speaks of dying to 
sin, he has in view people who once lived to sin. They are 
to change their attitude and relation to it, now that they 
are Christians; they are to reckon themselves dead to it, 
to become every day more insensible to its appeal. But 
it is more than doubtful whether Paul ever associated this 
ethical dying to sin with either the life or death of Jesus. 
He certainly could not do so if the assumption were that 
Jesus had once lived to sin; and it would not be natural 

[246] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

for him to use the expression "dying to sin" to describe 
the victorious conflict with temptation, which is one aspect 
of the whole career of Jesus. Further, though he would not 
have denied that the death of Jesus crowned that victorious 
conflict which filled His life, the whole context of thought 
in which he says that the death which He died (on the cross) 
He died to sin once for all shows that something quite different 
from this was in his mind. When He died, He was done 
with sin; He had cleared all scores with it, and passed into 
a region where it could make no claim upon Him more; His 
life now was determined altogether not by sin and its respon- 
sibilities, but by God. This is quite remote from a daily 
crucifixion of the flesh such as is contemplated in Christ 
by the theory under review. 

Similar considerations apply to the second passage which 
has been adduced to support the theory (Rom. viii. 3 f.), 
"What the law could not do, in that it was weak through 
the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful 
flesh and as an offering for sin, condemned sin in the flesh; 
that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us who 
walk not after the flesh but after the spirit." The general 
idea here is that what the law could not do — viz., bring men 
to righteousness and life — God took another and more effec- 
tive way of doing : He sent His Son. The main proposition is 
that in which God is said, by the mission of His Son under 
the circumstances described, to have condemned sin in the 
flesh; and this is interpreted, by the advocates of the theory 
under discussion, as the result of Christ's life and work. 
He appeared in the world "in the likeness of sinful flesh and 
in connection with sin." He had the very same nature 
which we have, with the same latent possibilities of evil in 
it ; He had the same flesh which we have, with all its natural 

[247] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

antipathy to the spirit. But in Him these latent possibilities 
were never allowed to emerge in act; the flesh was crucified 
every instant before any one of its impulses could declare 
itself as actual sin. Everything that in us might have and 
would have ripened into sin was in Him extinguished before 
it could begin to grow, and it is in the light of this that we 
have to interpret the phrase "condemned sin in the flesh." 
What it means is that Christ proved by His sinless life in 
the flesh that sin was not inevitable in the flesh; sinful 
men need not feel themselves shut up to despair; there was 
a possibility for them of escape and victory. By living in 
the flesh — in the very human nature in which it is our lot 
to live — a life without sin, Christ had reconciled that nature 
to God in His own person, and He held out in the gospel 
a similar reconciliation, in a similarly triumphant life, to 
all who were doomed to call sinful flesh their own. They 
could crucify the flesh as He had done, and have the just 
demand of the law fulfilled in them as it was in Him. 

The passage is difficult, but there are many objections 
to this rendering of it. For one thing, it lifts it off the hinges, 
and interprets it as if there were no system of Pauline thoughts 
in which it must find its place. For another, it disregards 
the expression nepl djuaprtas, the natural meaning of which 
is that it is Christ in the character of a sacrifice for sin, and 
not merely of one who allowed sin no place in His will, to 
whom salvation is due. Further, it is a very forced con- 
struction which contrives to draw hope for sinners from the 
doctrine that the sinless life of Jesus condemns sin in the 
flesh. The natural inference from such an expression is 
not that sin is not inevitable, and that therefore men may 
hope to live without it; but that sin is not inevitable, and 
that therefore those who live in sin, as all men do, are inexcus- 

[248] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

able. This is the moral suggested by the analogous use of 
"condemn" in the familiar gospel passage: "The men of 
Nineveh shall rise up in the judgment with this generation 
and shall condemn it" (Matt. xii. 41). If we read Paul's 
words in the context of his own thoughts they yield quite a 
different sense. It is not Christ's sinless life in the form of 
our sinful flesh by which sin is condemned; it is condemned 
by God in sending Christ in our nature and as a sacrifice for 
sin. How this sacrifice is made, and how it tells, according 
to Paul, are matters for further explanation : the point with 
which we have to do here is that it is not done simply by 
Christ's personal victory as a man over sin. This might be 
inspiring, or it might, as just explained, be the quenching of 
the sinner's last hope. It is certainly not for Paul an exhaus- 
tive account of the moral task of Jesus in reconciling the 
world to God. 

The truth which is the inspiration of this view is, however, 
a real and important truth which must have its place in any 
adequate doctrine of reconciliation. If it is not fairly deduci- 
ble — as to the writer seems obvious — from any of the Biblical 
passages cited, it is fairly covered by the term apxoyos, as 
the New Testament applies it to Jesus. This picturesque 
word is variously rendered in the English version. "Ye slew 
the Prince of life" (Acts iii. 15). "Him God exalted as a 
Prince and a Saviour" (Acts v. 3 1 ) . "It pleased God to make 
the Captain of our salvation perfect through sufferings" (Heb. 
ii. 10) . "Looking unto Jesus the Author and finisher of faith" 
(Heb. xii. 2). There is something peculiarly felicitous and 
suggestive in Dr. Moffatt's rendering, the Pioneer, though all 
the associations of the English term pioneer are not equally 
appropriate in all the contexts. But what it invariably 
implies is that Jesus has trodden the path which all who 

[249] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

are to be saved must tread. He has made the path by tread- 
ing it Himself, and apart from this He would not have the 
power He actually exercises to bring men to the Father. 
Moral power, as Bushnell is never tired of telling us, must 
be won by moral means; it is the victory of Jesus over sin 
which is the basis of His power with sinners. His power, 
too, must be exercised in constraining sinners to face the 
same foes, to fight the good fight till the last breath, to 
Tesist even until blood striving against sin; it is thus, and 
only thus, that He becomes for them a living way to the 
Father. Nevertheless to describe Him as dpxnyos or Pioneer 
does not exhaust His significance as Reconciler. It con- 
ceives of Him too exclusively as on a level with us, and as 
having the same battle to fight which we have. He and 
we are both face to face with sin in the world, and are con- 
ceived as having the same task with regard to it. But this 
does not answer to all the facts. The world not only contains 
sin in the sense of a power hostile to Christ and to us, a 
power which He has vanquished in bloody conflict, and 
which we must vanquish in His train; it contains our sin. 
Besides its relation to sin abstractly considered, the work 
of the Reconciler must have some specific relation to sin 
in this latter aspect; it must deal with sin not merely as 
a power at work in the world, but as something for which 
responsibility already lies upon us. The Reconciler must 
not simply overcome sin in His own person; He must do 
something bearing upon our sin, and the sin of the whole 
world. 

Nothing is more conspicuous in the New Testament than 
that the life and death of Jesus are to be interpreted in this 
light, and that as we approach this apprehension of His 
work we are approaching the secret of reconciliation. The 

[250] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

Jesus who was born into our race and our lot made Himself 
one with us in love to the uttermost. Nothing in the life 
of men was alien to Him; there was nothing but touched 
Him profoundly. He did not look on His own things only, 
but on the things of others also ; He loved His neighbour as 
Himself. In all this there was nothing artificial, no carry- 
ing out of a programme : it arose inevitably and spontaneously 
out of His situation as a man among men, or rather as the 
beloved Son of the Father in a family of alienated children. 
He took all the burdens of the race upon Himself in passion- 
ate sympathy. Above all He took that heaviest burden under 
which the race was sinking with despair and death. He bore 
our sins. In every sense and to every extent to which love 
could do so, He made them His own. Can we develop what 
this means, and say whether here is the ultimate secret of 
Christ's reconciling power 1 ? 

We are at least supported in making the attempt if we 
look at the life and death of Jesus as they are represented 
in the gospels and interpreted in the apostolic writings. 
But for the sin of the world, that life and death would not 
have been what they were; they were determined by sin to 
be what we see them to have been. The very act in which 
Jesus comes upon the stage of history — His baptism by 
John — is in this respect of profound significance. No doubt 
the baptism has many aspects which can be independently 
emphasised: it was the anointing of Jesus as the Messianic 
King, it was an hour in which He was signally conscious of 
His relation to the Father and of His Messianic calling, it 
was in some sense a great act of self-dedication or self-con- 
secration to a work which only time and Providence would 
define : but no such conceptions of it enable us to answer the 
question which evidently exercised the mind of the Church 

[251] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

from the beginning, — Why did the sinless one come to be 
baptized with what was explicitly declared to be a baptism 
of repentance looking to remission of sins? There is no 
answer to this question, equal to its importance, but that 
which allows us to see Jesus, at the very outset of His career, 
identifying Himself, as far as love enabled Him to do so, 
with sinful men. We might have expected that where the 
work of God was being done, as through the prophetic 
ministry of John, Jesus would be present; but we should 
have looked for Him at John's side, confronting the people, 
assisting the prophet to proclaim the word of God. Yet 
nothing is more true to the character of Jesus and to the 
spirit in which He carries through His mission than that He 
appears not at John's side, but among the people who came 
to be baptized; His entrance on His work, like the whole 
work from beginning to end, was an act of loving communion 
with us in our misery. He numbered Himself with the 
transgressors, and made the burden of our sins His own. 

A similar relation to sin is implied in all Jesus' dealings 
with sinners for their forgiveness and restoration to God. 
Nothing is more certain than His power to win sinners from 
their sin and to bring them to the Father, and nothing is 
more certain than that such power depends absolutely on 
the bearing of sin in the sense at present in view — on enter- 
ing lovingly, sympathetically, and profoundly into the sin- 
ner's experience, and realising through love and sympathy the 
crushing weight which sin is for him. This is the vital 
difference between Jesus and the Pharisees, between good- 
ness which bears the sinner's burden and says, "Come unto 
Me, and I will give you rest," and goodness which has no 
sympathy with the sinner, which bears no burden for him, 
which says, "Stand by thyself; come not near me, for I am 

[252] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

holier than thou." Pharisaic goodness has no redemptive 
power in it just because it has no love in it and bears no 
burden; the sinner is not moved by it except to curse it, 
and in doing so he shows at least some sense for what good- 
ness is. For God also curses it as a wicked slander upon 
Himself. But the goodness of Jesus has the redeeming 
virtue which unquestionably belongs to it just because love 
is the soul of it, love which in its very nature makes the 
burdens of others its own, whatever these burdens be. If 
sin is the most fatal and crushing of all, then sin will weigh 
heaviest upon Him. When Jesus received sinners in the 
gospel they were conscious of this. He did not talk about 
sin-bearing love; He exhibited it. They knew in His pres- 
ence what forgiveness cost. They saw it in His face, and 
heard it in the tones of His voice. They were aware that 
He had carried on His own spirit the weight which was 
lifted from theirs, and that their debt to Him was immeasur- 
able. That was why they poured their precious ointment 
on His head, and wet His feet with tears. If there was not 
an articulate word in the New Testament on the subject of 
Christ bearing sin, we should argue quite confidently from 
the redemptive power of goodness as displayed in Him, 
that He did unquestionably bear it. He bore it in a love 
which entered victoriously into sinful hearts and reconciled 
them to God. 

But there are articulate words in the gospels which exhibit 
the whole life and calling of Jesus as having relation to 
sin, and therefore give to this bearing of sin a central and 
decisive significance in His work. "I came," He says in 
one of those great utterances in which the purpose of His 
presence in the world is disclosed, "I came not to call the 
righteous, but sinners." Sinners are for Him the centre of 

[253] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

interest on earth, and to bear their sin in a sympathetic 
sense of what a burden it is for them must lie at the very 
centre of His work. Again He says, "The Son of Man came 
to seek and to save that which is lost." The very words 
used to describe the state of the sinful — that which is lost — 
are a pathetic expression of Christ's sense of their situation. 
Nobody could have hit upon them whose heart had not 
been burdened by the contemplation of the life which men 
lead when sin has separated them from God. The sinners 
themselves do not always feel the burden. There are states 
of levity and stupidity in which men are insensible to what 
they are, and to the responsibilities which lie upon them; 
but the burden only weighs the heavier then upon Him who 
can feel it, and who knows through what soul travail the 
dull heaTt must be awakened to penitence and faith, and 
so be reconciled to God. And once more, there is the great 
word in which Jesus near the close of His life again denned 
the end and the method of His mission in the world. "The 
Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister, 
and to give His life a ransom for many" (Mark x. 45). The 
liberation of sinners is the end which Jesus has in view; 
and though the giving of His life a ransom may include 
more, it includes at least that spending of His being in love 
and sympathy with the sinful which can be described as 
bearing their sins. It is true that in the Synoptic tradition 
of Jesus' words the precise expression, "to bear sins" does 
not occur. It is true also that where it does occur in later 
apostolic thought, it has to be interpreted in its own context, 
and may be found to carry other ideas than those which 
modern psychology finds it congenial to attach to the words. 
But, words apart, it cannot be questioned that there is some- 
thing in the facts of the life of Jesus, something deep, per- 

[254] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

vading, and decisive, which we can naturally express by 
saying He bore our sins; and that this something enters, 
essentially, into His reconciling power. 

The more the life of Jesus as well as His death has been 
taken into consideration in studying His work, the more 
has this view been emphasised. Even when we wish to 
interpret the death of Jesus, we feel that we can do no more 
than regard it as the consummation of His life. We find 
it indispensable to set it in the light of the whole impression 
made on us by the life. That impression is not in the least 
ambiguous. The life of Jesus, from beginning to end, is 
in all its relations to others a life of love. It is love, then, 
we have to understand. Without love, there could be no 
reconciliation, and what we have to discover is how love 
functions — what it does, suffers, or promises, in relation to 
man as a being in need of reconciliation to God. 

We have two books in our language by men of original 
spiritual insight and intellectual power which make a noble 
contribution to this study. One is Bushnell's The Vicarious 
Sacrifice, the other is McLeod Campbell's The Nature of 
the Atonement. The former dates from 1865, the latter 
from 1856, and it may be questioned whether anything has 
been written since to rival either as an interpretation of 
Christ's reconciling work purely through the idea of love. 
In Bushnell the idea is taken more broadly. He views the 
vicarious sacrifice as "grounded in principles of universal 
obligation," and He illustrates the love of Christ in relation 
to other burdens which He bore as well as to the burden of 
sin. Thus to him, as to the first evangelist, it is the key to 
Christ's healing ministry. "Himself," says Matthew, after 
narrating typical specimens of our Lord's work as a physician, 
"himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses" (Matt. 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

viii. 17). He was not sick or infirm Himself, but He felt 
in genuine sympathy what sickness and infirmity meant to 
others, and in love He made their burdens His own. He 
had no medical science, no professional skill; when He 
healed it was through His personality and at a personal 
expense; virtue went out of Him, and He felt the drain 
upon His strength. It is not exaggerating to say that He 
really made His own the pains He relieved; it was at His 
cost that the sufferings of others were lightened. This con- 
ception, obviously, can be extended by analogy to Christ's 
sympathy with the moral sickness and infirmity of men, 
His feeling with them under the burden, the disablement, 
and the alienation of sin. He did not become a sinner out 
of His sympathy with the state of the sinful, any more than 
He became a sick man out of His sympathy with the diseased ; 
but He took on Himself, in the one case as in the other, 
as far as the nature of things admitted it, the weight under 
which men laboured. He bore our sins, as He bore our 
diseases, on His loving heart. He identified Himself with 
us, as far as love made it possible for Him to do so, in the 
whole circumstances of our stricken life. This identifica- 
tion of Himself with us is the very meaning of love, and its 
power to win men from sin to God is self-evident. It does 
not need any explanation: to ask for explanation is like 
asking for a candle by which to see the sun. 

McLeod Campbell would have had no call to disown any- 
thing Bushnell says of the essentially vicarious nature of 
love, but he studies the love of Christ more exclusively in 
relation to sin, and he thinks more constantly of what sin 
means to God as well as of what it means to man. Perhaps 
there is a certain degree of artificiality in his treating separate- 
ly, both with regard to the retrospective and the prospective 

[256] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

aspects of the atonement, Christ' s dealing with men on 
behalf of God, and His dealing with God on behalf of men. 
For there is just one body of fact to deal with — namely, the 
life of Christ, as a life inspired throughout by love — and 
we do not get new material under the two heads, but only 
a new point of view. If the life of Christ is inspired through- 
out by love, it is a revelation of God, for God is love; and 
in this sense it is an appeal to men in the name of the Father. 
But it is also a revelation of man, for love is the true law 
of the human being, love to God and love to His neighbour; 
and in this sense the life of Christ may be said to constitute 
an appeal to God in the name of men, or an appeal to the 
Father in the name of the children. But the appeal to God 
and the appeal to man are made by the one life of love, and 
though theologians may emphasise the one or the other as 
they reflect upon the method and the power of reconcilia- 
tion, it can hardly be questioned that, consciously or 
unconsciously, both will influence their thoughts. 

Broadly speaking, Bushnell emphasised the appeal to 
man in the name of the Father: what to him is conspicuous 
in Christ is the love which identifies itself with man and his 
interests; man, so to speak, is the sole object and concern 
of that love. With McLeod Campbell it is otherwise. He 
thinks not only of man but of God as interested in sin, and 
as necessarily related to it. Apart from this thought of 
God, there is a tendency to regard sin as a misfortune rather 
than a fault; sympathy with the sinner is apt to lapse into 
an extenuating or condoning of sin; it becomes emotional 
or sentimental, and ceases to be, what it always was in 
Jesus, ethical and austere. We may think what we will 
of the peculiar form in which McLeod Campbell expresses 
his mind on this subject, but there can be no question that 

[257] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

he is dealing in it with something which is as essential to 
reconciliation, in the Christian sense, as Christ's sympathy 
with men in the calamity, the burden, the ruin of their sin. 
When He identifies Himself with God's interest in the situa- 
tion as well as man's, Christ sees sin as something which 
God righteously condemns, and cannot but condemn, and He 
acknowledges in human nature the justice of that condemna- 
tion. He sees it as something from which, in the divine 
order, there is but one way of escape, that of an adequate 
repentance; and seeing further that for man left to himself 
there is no hope, because the very sin which calls for repent- 
ance has disabled him spiritually and made him incapable 
of a repentance really answering to his guilt, in a very agony 
of love He takes this responsibility of man to God upon 
Himself, and makes in the place of sinful men that deeply 
felt acknowledgment of human sin which is the repentance 
due from the race but beyond its power to render. It is 
best to give this in the author's own words : it is the original 
and creative element in his mind which has entered as a 
ferment into all Christian thinking for the last two genera- 
tions. "That oneness of mind with the Father, which 
towards man took the form of condemnation of sin, would 
in the Son's dealing with the Father in relation to our sins, 
take the form of a perfect confession of our sins. This con- 
fession, as to its own nature, must have been a perfect Amen 
in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man. Such 
an Amen was due in the truth of things. He who was the 
truth could not be in humanity and not utter it. . . . He 
who so responds to the divine wrath against sin, saying, 
"Thou art righteous, O Lord, who judgest so," is necessarily 
receiving the full apprehension and realisation of that wrath, 
as well as of that sin against which it comes forth, into His 

[258] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

soul and spirit, into the bosom of the divine humanity, and, 
so receiving it, He responds to it with a perfect response — 
a response from the depths of that divine humanity — and 
in that perfect response He absorbs it. For that response has 
all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all 
the sin of man, — a perfect sorrow — a perfect contrition — 
all the elements of such a repentance, and that in absolute 
perfection, all — excepting the personal consciousness of 
sin; — and by that perfect response in Amen to the mind of 
God in relation to sin is the wrath of God rightly met, and 
that is accorded to divine justice which is its due, and could 
alone satisfy it." * Discounting the questionable nomen- 
clature here — the use of the term "repentance" to describe 
a spiritual state or act in which there is no personal con- 
sciousness of sin — it does not seem to the writer open to 
question that this description of what is involved in Christ's 
relation to sin, considered not as man's misfortune but as 
an offence against God, is sound. Christ saw what sin was 
to God as we because of our sin itself could not see it; He 
felt what it was to God as we for the same reason could not 
feel it; He owned the justice of God in condemning it and 
repelling it inexorably, even while He yearned over His 
sinful children, and longed for their reconciliation. It was 
unhappy, to say the least of it, to call this repentance, or 
vicarious repentance; but it is a description of facts in the 
experience of the Saviour, and of facts on which His power 
to reconcile us to God is essentially dependent. If He had 
not thus seen and felt what sin is to God, if He had not 
thus acknowledged God's justice in condemning it, we could 
never have been brought through Him to the same insight 
and sorrow, to the same confession and acknowledgment, 

1 The Nature of the Atonement, pp. 117-119. 

[259] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

apart from which the reconciliation of sinners to God is 
self-evidently an impossibility. For to be reconciled to 
God means at all events that God's mind about sin, which 
is revealed to us in Christ, through Christ becomes our own. 
Although McLeod Campbell is often classed with writers 
who view the work of Christ only in its relation to man, 
this is clearly unjust. He certainly would have said that 
the orthodox writers on the atonement viewed it too exclu- 
sively in its relation to God. They dealt with it almost 
wholly in what he calls its retrospective aspect; it was an 
appeal to God which issued in the forgiveness of sins on His 
part. They were less alive to its prospective aspect, to the 
fact that it included an appeal to man which evoked eternal 
life. But though he laid a new emphasis on the truth that 
the atonement is meant to regenerate men, and to do so 
directly, and that a doctrine of atonement which is not 
essentially related to the new eternal life is fatally defective, 
he never held that the work of Christ had reference only to 
man. In His reconciling work Christ dealt with God on 
behalf of men as well as with men on behalf of God; His 
"repentance," to use the objectionable name for the indubit- 
able and essential facts, was addressed to God and had infinite 
value to Him ; it was on the basis of it, and on the assurance 
that it could be reproduced in sinners, that God was able 
to forgive sins; in the strict sense of the term it was an 
objective atonement. McLeod Campbell puts this quite 
unambiguously when, after summing up all that enters into 
the life of Jesus, alike as a dealing with us on behalf of the 
Father and a dealing with the Father on our behalf, he says 
that here "we have the elements of the atonement before 
us as presented by the Son and accepted by the Father, 
and see the grounds of the divine procedure in granting to 

[260] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

us remission of our sins and the gift of eternal life." He has 
the same difficulty in combining this objective atonement 
with the free gift of Christ to the world by the Father that 
earlier theologians have in combining the merits of Christ 
with the grace of God. His disposition, perhaps due to the 
circumstances of the time, is to emphasise grace, "the ulti- 
mate foundation in God for that peace with God which we 
have in Christ" ; 1 but he never eviscerates the "in Christ" so 
that it ceases to signify something which weighs with God. 
He would have felt that to do so was to deal deceitfully both 
with the gospel facts and with the apostolic interpretation 
of them, and to cut the nerve of the reconciling power in 
Christ. 2 

No one can question, so far as it goes, the truth and power 
of this explanation of the process by which Christ achieves 
the work of reconciliation. Without such a process — 
without a love which entered thus profoundly and sympa- 
thetically into all that sin is both for God and man, and took 
upon its own spirit the crushing weight of it — that work 
could never have been accomplished. All that is positive 
in the doctrines of Bushnell and McLeod Campbell, not to 
speak of the numberless writers who have learned from them, 
is to be welcomed without reserve. We are to think of the 
work of atonement or reconciliation as a work arising out of 
the situation in which Christ found Himself as a member 
of the human race; as one with us He spontaneously, under 
the impulse of love, makes all our burdens His own. He 

1 The Nature of the Atonement, p. 287. "To stop at the atonement, and 
rest in the fact of the atonement, instead of ascending through it to that in 
God from which it has proceeded, and which demanded it for its due 
expression, is to misapprehend the atonement as to its nature, and place, 
and end." 

2 Ibid., p. 151 f. 

[261] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

makes the burden of our sin His own as far as that can 
be done by one who Himself knows no sin, and to whom 
no part of the burden of sin ever comes home through a 
bad conscience of His own. Stress is laid on both parts of 
this conception, and all with the idea of preserving for the 
work of Christ in reconciliation a purely ethical character. 
Such a character, of course, belongs to it as the spontaneous 
manifestation of love, determined by the relations in which 
Christ stood to God on the one side and to man on the other; 
but this character, it is agreed, can only be maintained if 
it is made quite clear that the burden Christ bore under the 
inspiration of His love cannot be described as penal. Punish- 
ment is something which can only exist in and for a bad 
conscience, and the sufferings into which His love led Him, 
and in and through which His reconciling work is achieved, 
do not come to Him through a bad conscience, and therefore 
are in no sense penal. That the innocent, moved by love, 
should suffer with the guilty and for them, is in line with all 
we know of the moral order under which we live; it is the 
triumph of goodness in its highest form. But that the innocent 
should be punished for the guilty is not moral at all. It is in 
every sense of the term impossible. As an incident in the 
divine administration of the world it is simply inconceivable. 
All this may be admitted without reserve, and we may 
reflect with pleasure that it excludes a great deal by which 
the Christian conscience has often been shocked in discus- 
sions of the atonement. It excludes the idea that the Son 
of God, with whom the Father was well pleased, should be 
regarded at the same time as the object of the Father's dis- 
pleasure, the victim of His wrath, on whom the punishment 
of all the world's sin was inflicted. It excludes all those 
ideas of equivalence between what Christ suffered and what 

[262] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

men as sinners were under an obligation to suffer, which 
revolt both intelligence and conscience in much of what is 
called orthodox theology. It excludes all those assimila- 
tions of the sufferings of our Lord in the garden and on the 
cross to the pains of the damned, which cast a hideous shadow 
on many interpretations of His Passion. It may not be out 
of place to quote one or two of the most signal instances 
of this perversion to show how essential it had become to 
emphasise the purely ethical character of the work of Christ. 
Luther, for example, carried away by the passion with which 
he exulted in Christ's identification of Himself with men, 
could write that "in His tender innocent heart He had to 
feel God's wrath and judgment against sin, to taste for us 
eternal death and damnation, and in a word to suffer every- 
thing which a condemned sinner has merited and must 
suffer eternally." "Look at Christ," he says again to the 
sinner dreading wrath and death, "who for thy sake has 
gone to hell and been abandoned by God as one damned for 
ever." This is his interpretation of "My God, my God, why 
hast Thou forsaken Me?" 1 Calvin, less passionate, is more 
cautious, and guards against the idea that God was ever 
adversarius or iratus in relation to Christ; yet He can allow 
himself to write of the descensus ad inferos that here Christ 
endured in His soul the dire torments of a condemned and 
lost man. 2 M. Riviere, who holds that the orthodox Romish 
doctrine is that the work of redemption is an act of moral 
reparation, and that nothing that is not moral can enter 
into it or have any relevance to it, ascribes the appearance 
in Catholic preaching of ideas like those just illustrated to 
the pernicious influence of Protestantism on the true Church. 

1 Thomasius, Christi Person und IVerk (3rd ed.), ii. 177. 

2 Institutio, 11. xvi. 10. 

[263] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

The abandon with which they are expressed in the writers 
from whom he quotes seems to show that they found in 
Catholicism a soil at least as congenial as that which he 
regards as native to them. "Jesus," says one, "appears in 
the eyes of His Father as the universal sinner, comme le 
peche vivant, as a being accursed. . . . God no longer sees 
in Him His well-beloved Son, but the victim for sin, the 
sinner of all times and of all places, on whom He is about 
to bring down in all its weight the rigour of His justice." 
"Spare Him, Lord," cries another, "it is thy Son." "No, 
no," is the answer; "it is sin; it must be chastised." A 
third, commenting on the text Oportet Christum pati, is bold- 
er still. He depicts Jesus between the sin of the world on one 
side, from which He shrinks in horror, and the inexorable 
justice of heaven on the other; He stands there face to 
face with the divine decree that lays all this sin on Him 
that He may satisfy this justice. It is hardly possible to 
translate to the end what follows. "II faut qu'il s'ouvre a 
ce double deluge du peche et de la peine, qu'il mange ce 
pain amer de nos iniquites, qu'il boire jusqu' a la lie ce vin 
apre de la colere celeste; il faut qu'il absorbe et cette fange 
humaine et cette vengeance divine; il faut que lui, qui est le 
sanctuaire du monde et le cceur de l'humanite, il en devienne 
l'egout." A still more revolting extravagance in the same 
direction may be added. "Become le peche universel, He 
has a sort of likeness to evil, to Satan, to all the reprobate; 
for the righteous, for the angels, for the immaculate Virgin, 
He is an object of repulsion; God Himself is about to launch 
His anathema against Him; He will be V excommunie 
universel, le maudit." 1 It might be supposed that excesses 
like these would cure themselves, but it is good to have 

1 Riviere, Le Dogme de la Redemption: etude theologique, pp. 232 ff. 

[264] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

them barred out by such a conception of Christ's relation 
to sin, in its bearing alike on God and man, as we have just 
been considering. It keeps within the limits of the moral 
world, and of moral reality and sanity, and we can have no 
sure standing ground if this is withdrawn from us. 

The question remains, however, whether it exhausts the 
truth about Christ's achievement of reconciliation. It 
emphasises the fact that the work of Christ is an ethical 
work, that love is its motive, that it is transacted from 
beginning to end in the moral universe, and that it makes 
a rational and moral appeal to us. On the other hand, in 
the minds of many of its advocates it has been associated 
with a tendency to overlook, or to depreciate, the Passion 
of Christ as a concrete historical fact, or to separate the 
physical aspects of the Passion — the mere physical death, 
as it is sometimes called — from the spirit of love and obedi- 
ence in which Christ died, as though this spirit were the only 
thing which counted in the work of reconciliation. This 
is done consciously and on principle by many Roman Catholic 
theologians, who emphasise moral reparation as the proper 
work of Christ. Thus M. Riviere asks point blank, "If the 
Christ had not suffered, if He had not died upon the cross, 
would He nevertheless have redeemed us 4 ?" and he pro- 
ceeds unhesitatingly, "To this question Catholic theologians 
unanimously reply in the affirmative. It follows with perfect 
clearness that neither the suffering, the death, nor the cross 
represents the essential, or, to use the language of the school, 
the formal element in redemption. They are so many contin- 
gent circumstances, the reason for which is to be sought dans 
les convenances du mystere, non dans ses exigences absolves." 1 
That is, they were in keeping with the wonderful work which 
1 Op. cit., p. 260 f. 

[265] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

God was doing in Christ, but it was not really dependent on 
them. It would not have looked so well if the Redeemer 
had died in His bed, or if He had not died at all, but the work 
of redemption would have been accomplished all the same. 
"Non mors" as St. Bernard says, "sed voluntas placuit sponte 
morientis." Much Protestant teaching, without rising to 
the audacity which Mr. Riviere ascribes to all Catholic theo- 
logians, has a bias in the same direction. Perhaps it is due 
to a reaction against the tradition which treated the cross 
and the death of Christ as purely objective and penal inflic- 
tions, and not as consequences brought upon the Saviour by 
the love in which, in a sinful world, He identified Himself 
at once with God and with man. Such a reaction would be 
legitimate in itself, for that Christ's Passion enters into His 
ethical life is indubitable, and it is as part of His ethical 
life that it has power to win men to God; but it is not 
legitimate if it goes so far as to say that the ethical element 
— the spirit in which Jesus suffered — is everything, and that 
it would have made no difference, or none that was vital, if 
He had not suffered at all. 

There is, in point of fact, something so artificial and unreal 
in this abstract separation of the death of Jesus from the 
spirit in which He died, that even those who lay the greatest 
stress upon it find it difficult to express themselves with any 
approach to consistency. The language of Scripture and the 
common sense of men assert themselves against the arbi- 
trary element in such distinctions. McLeod Campbell himself 
is a signal illustration of what is here meant. In one place 
he tells us that a certain passage in Scripture "prepares us to 
find in the moral and spiritual elements in the sufferings of 
Christ, the atoning power that was in them; and to see how, 
though there is nothing of an atoning nature in death, the 

[266] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

wages of sin — not in the death of all who have died since 
death entered the world, nor in all death that may yet be 
endured; yet was the death of Christ, who tasted death 
for every man, because of the condemnation of sin in His 
spirit, an atonement for the sin of the whole world." Here 
death is roundly pronounced irrelevant to atonement, and 
then in the same breath we are told that Christ tasted death 
for every man, and that this, in virtue of "the condemnation 
of sin in His spirit," was itself the atonement. 1 There is 
undoubtedly a want of unity in this statement which needs 
elucidation. The same remark applies to another passage 
in which he approaches the death of Christ, so to speak, 
from the opposite side. Dealing with the contemplation of 
our Lord's sufferings during the hour and power of darkness, 
he writes : "Feelings of a strong and solemn as well as tender 
character, have doubtless been thus cherished ; and doubtless, 
the element of gratitude has been present: yet there was 
not, for there could not be, in images of physical suffering 
anything of the nature of spiritual light, — however such 
light may have been present along with them, being received 
otherwise." 2 The last words, "being received otherwise," 
strike curiously on the mind. They are as much as to say 
that the Passion of Jesus, in its concrete reality — for no 
human soul, contemplating it as it was, ever in the act and 
process of contemplation regarded it as a "physical" experi- 
ence as distinct from a moral one — is unable to speak for 
itself. But this is simply not true. Whatever the cross of 
Jesus does, it speaks for itself. It is not by the help of light 
"received otherwise," but by its own light, that we see and 
feel what it means. But that is only to say in other words 
that the absolute distinction of physical and spiritual — the 

1 The Nature of the Atonement, p. 105. 2 Ibid., p. 220. 

[267] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

abstract separation of the death of Jesus, as non-significant, 
from the spirit in which He died, as infinitely valuable to 
God and prevalent with man — needs to be revised. And 
as we proceed in McLeod Campbell's work, we find that he 
is driven almost unconsciously to this point of view. He 
not only speaks of Christ as tasting death for every man, 
he says the peace which became perfected on the cross is 
set forth to us as made there ; * he speaks of death as Christ 
passed through it as the perfecting of the atonement, 2 and 
of "the death of Christ as filled with the divine judgment 
on sin." 3 What is more striking, he explicitly and formally 
goes beyond the abstract view which disregards the "physical" 
aspects of the Passion and which lays exclusive emphasis 
on the "spiritual" or "ethical" ones, when he writes: "It 
was not only the divine mind that had to be responded to, 
but also that expression of the divine mind which was con- 
tained in God's making death the wages of sin." 4 It is 
impossible for any one who attaches the slightest importance 
to the New Testament presentation of the facts to question 
that this last utterance is that which is most in harmony 
with the apostolic gospel. The one thing that the apostles 
have to tell about Christ — what they deliver first of all to 
all men — is that Christ died for our sins. He suffered for 
them once, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us 
to God. We are reconciled to God by the death of His Son. 
He is placarded before our eyes on earth as Xpiards karav- 
pufievos, Christ in the abiding reality and power of His cross. 
He is seen in heaven as the apvlov w ea<f>ay/jievov; the 
aspect in which He is of eternal interest to us is that He 
was slain as a sacrifice, and that the virtue of His sacri- 

1 The Nature of the Atonement, p. 249. 2 Ibid., p. 262. 

3 Ibid., p. 268. 4 Ibid., p. 261. 

[268] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

ficial death abides in Him for ever. There is no dispute 
in Scripture about the spirit in which He died, about His 
obedience to the Father or His love to men; but in Scrip- 
ture these things are not separated even in imagination 
from the cross; they radiate from the cross; they are the 
meaning and message of the cross, and are not revealed 
in all their dimensions except through the cross. To insu- 
late them from the cross is to lose them. To a really philo- 
sophical mind as well as to a simply Christian one the question, 
"If Christ had not suffered, would He nevertheless have 
redeemed us 4 ?" is puerile and unreal. The work of redemp- 
tion has actually been done by Christ who died, and the 
consent of all Catholic theologians, that He would have 
redeemed us all the same even if He had not died, adds 
nothing to our knowledge or understanding. Intelligence is 
given us, not to ask and answer fancy questions about a 
world which has never been and never will be, but to in- 
terpret the actual world and things as they are. The fact 
being that Christ has redeemed us to God by His blood, 
to argue that He would have redeemed us nevertheless, 
though there had been no cross or passion, is neither pro- 
found nor sublime, but irrelevant. To an unsophisticated 
Christian, to talk of a redemption to which the death of 
Christ is not essential is to talk about nothing at all. The 
simplest evangelist here will always confound the subtlest 
theologian; the foolishness of God is wiser than men. 

Plainly what is wanted here is a more concrete, less analys- 
ing and abstract way of looking at the death of Christ, than 
has sometimes established itself in theology. The experi- 
ences of a human being are not physical merely, or spiritual 
merely, they are human; and in humanity the physical 
and the spiritual coalesce or interpenetrate; they are indis- 

[269] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

soluble elements in one reality. The same consideration 
has to be extended to all our thoughts of God's relations 
to man. God does not deal with us as merely physical or 
as merely spiritual beings, He deals with us as what we are, 
beings in whom the physical and the spiritual interpenetrate 
in the way just described. He deals with us as beings whose 
life is rooted in the vast world of nature, and vibrates to 
every throb in its constitution. There are not two abstractly 
independent worlds, a physical and a spiritual one; to believe 
in God means to believe that what we call the physical world 
is caught up and integrated into a system which is spiritual, 
and that it can and does in the last resort serve as the instru- 
ment for expressing the mind and will of God. When we 
say, for example, that God condemns sin, we do not say 
something the truth of which is exclusively spiritual; God's 
condemnation of sin finds expression in innumerable ways 
in which not only conscience, or the spiritual element in man 
as we distinguish it from the physical, is His organ or the 
sphere of His operations, but the whole constitutional course 
of nature. When we say that Christ acknowledges the 
justice of God's condemnation of sin, we do not mean only 
that He thinks it right that the man who sins should have 
a bad conscience, and that he should shrink from meeting 
God and find that fellowship with Him is impossible; we 
mean further that He acknowledges as just the whole divine 
reaction against sin which expresses itself in the nature of 
things, as well as in the soul of man. And He not only 
acknowledges it as just in itself, He acknowledges it as just 
while Himself living under it and enduring all that it in- 
volved for sinful men, though Himself without sin. Short 
of this, we do not really get to the Biblical conception of 
atonement. We do not get to that in the experience of 

[270] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

Jesus which, as the most unfathomable proof of love, has 
both supreme value to God and supreme influence with 
men. 

The case may be stated thus. Christ's death was once 
presented in theology too abstractly, in no relation to His 
life, simply as the doom of sin, which He came to earth to 
undergo for us. Apart from His death He was really a 
sort of lay figure. His whole object in being here was to 
die, to have the punishment of our sins inflicted on Him 
at the cross, and so to deliver us from them. It is no wonder 
that a view so inadequate provoked reactions, and that 
one more intelligible, more human, more ethically interest- 
ing, took its place. The death of Christ was now treated 
as the culmination of His life, and the key to it was sought 
in His life. His career was interpreted through categories 
which are immediately applicable to other lives as well as 
His, and in this way it seemed to become at the same time 
more intelligible and more inspiring. It was a career deter- 
mined throughout by love to God and man; to use ancient 
terminology, it was the achievement of an infinite merit. 
His death simply crowns it; it was an act of heroic fidelity 
in which He resisted unto blood striving against sin. That 
all this is true, and that there is something in it which appeals 
to men with reconciling power, is not to be denied. But it 
is another question whether it is the whole truth, and whether 
the former view, repellent and inadequate as were many 
expressions of it, was not occupied with a reality to which 
the latter fails to do justice. The death of Christ was an 
act of heroism and fidelity, the crown of a life by the whole 
course of which humanity was ennobled; and when we look 
at it in this aspect we are moved to think with joy and pride 
of the heights to which human nature can rise. But it will 

[271] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

hardly be asserted that this is the aspect in which the Passion 
is exclusively or mainly presented to us in the New Testa- 
ment. The lights there are more solemn, subdued, and awful. 
There is indeed in the fourth gospel the conception of a 
triumph pervading everything: "Now is the Son of Man 
glorified," "now is the Prince of this world cast out." But 
there is also even there, and still more in the other gospels, 
the sense of something dreadful and mysterious; a soul 
trouble of Jesus, a sorrow under which He is dismayed and 
ready to die, an agony of prayer, a bitter cup from which 
His whole being shrinks, an uncomprehended necessity for 
drinking it, a dark experience of being forsaken by God. 
There is no intention, in recalling these things, either to 
deny the truth of the view that Christ's death is the moral 
consummation of His life, and is to be interpreted as such, 
or to withdraw what has been said above about the penal 
character of His sufferings. They were not penal in the 
sense of coming to Him through a bad conscience, or in 
the sense that God was angry with Him personally, as if 
He had really been a guilty man. But they cannot be 
ignored; and it seems to the writer that if we contemplate 
Christ's life and death solely as a moral triumph throughout 
which He must have enjoyed the approbation of the Father, 
they must either be ignored, or regarded as due to misappre- 
hensions on the part of Jesus as to the true relation subsist- 
ing between Himself and God. Some shadow of unreality 
would then fall upon His soul trouble, His deadly sorrow, 
His agony, His sense of dereliction. It is impossible to 
accept any such view. These solemn things, in which so 
much of the power of the gospel is hidden, must not only 
have their complete reality recognised, but their justifica- 
tion sought out. And when we come to the point along 

[272] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

this line, can we say anything else than this: That while 
the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of 
coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience, or making Him 
the personal object of divine wrath, they were penal in the 
sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the 
divine reaction against sin in the race in which He was incor- 
porated, and that without doing so to the uttermost He could 
not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin, or the 
Reconciler of sinful men to God? When we look at our 
Lord's life and death from the side of His own initiative, so 
to speak — when we think of His career from beginning to end 
as one of truth, love, and fidelity to righteousness, which in- 
volved Him in all kinds of suffering and finally in a martyr's 
death — questions of this kind may never arise, or may be 
swept away on a flood of evasive eloquence. But when we 
look at these same things, as we are bound to do, from the side 
of the divine order — of the constitution of the world as a sys- 
tem in which there is an unceasing, dreadful, and finally fatal 
reaction against sin; when we see the events of Jesus' last 
hours, not only as a supreme moral triumph (justifiable as 
such a view is), but as an experience in which He knew what 
it was to be appalled, in an agony, stricken and desolate — such 
questions cannot be repressed. There is no getting past the 
fact that His sufferings had to do with sin. But they came on 
Him, not only because He would not sin, not only because 
He resisted unto blood, striving victoriously against sin, but 
because the world had sinned, and in becoming part of the 
world He stood committed to experience as its Saviour every- 
thing in which the divine reaction against sin is brought home 
to the soul. The cup the Father put into His hand, the cup 
of trembling from which He shrank in deadly fear — this is 

[273] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the meaning of aywvia — was the cup our sins had mingled. It 
has to be interpreted, not only through the moral heroism of 
Jesus triumphing over sin, but through the judgment of God 
reacting inexorably against sin. The Redeemer on His cross 
not only vanquished every temptation to sin ; He bowed His 
head in solemn submission to God's sentence upon it, and 
tasted death for every man. It is in this sense, and not only 
in a "merely" or "purely" spiritual one, that He bore our sins. 
No one questions that He bore them on His heart. The 
New Testament uniformly takes this for granted. But He 
bore them on His heart supremely in the very act and instant 
of bearing them in His body on the tree, and it is not in dis- 
tinguishing these as two truths, and still less by denying 
either, but in insisting upon their indissoluble interpenetra- 
tion, that we touch the nerve of Christ's reconciling power. 
If He had not died for us, He would have done nothing at all ; 
for of what use to sinful mortal men would be a Saviour who 
did not know what sin and death mean when they combine, 
as they do, to crush poor human nature ? And if He had not 
died for us in love, He would have done nothing at all ; for it 
is only love, holding out unimpaired through sin and death, 
and identifying itself at once with God, who inexorably repels 
sin and yearns with infinite longing over the sinner, and with 
man, who is lost in sin and death and yet remains capable of 
redemption, which is able to win for itself and for the God 
whom it reveals the faith of creatures sinking beneath the in- 
divisible burden of guilt and mortality. Sin is more concrete 
than moralists are apt to think, and the reactions against it 
more deep and far reaching. The Greek fathers were not 
wholly wrong when they emphasised the idea that Christ by 
His death delivers us from death : they had some sense of the 

[274] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

unity of death and sin. They realised that redemption was 
not merely a triumph for Jesus, but a tragedy, the most awful 
if also the most glorious moment in the history of man ; and 
if we lose the sense of this, we lose the key to any doctrine of 
reconciliation which can appeal to the New Testament. 

This view, no doubt, assumes what is often contested, and 
what will seem to many transparently false, that there is a 
real relation between death and sin. 1 As the New Testa- 
ment puts it, the wages of sin is death. But before this 
proposition is denied, it should be understood. It is not 
understood when it is treated as a piece of primitive myth- 
ology, the fanciful explanation given of the origin of death 
before there was any science in existence to give a real 
explanation. It is not understood when it is supposed to 
be refuted by the argument that death is natural, that it is 
really part of the mechanism of life in the system in which 
we exist, that it belongs to the constitution of nature as 
much as life itself does, and that it would have reigned in 
the world exactly as it has done, even if there had never 
been any such thing as sin. This argument is doubly un- 
convincing. In the first place, it is irrelevant, for it treats 
death as something which does not belong to the moral world 
at all, but only to the natural, whereas the only death with 
which we are concerned is that which is the experience of 
moral beings, and must be brought into the moral system 
and morally interpreted somehow. In the second place, it 
is unconvincing, because, like the argument that Christ would 
have redeemed us even if He had never died, it is an argu- 
ment about what, when we take all the facts into view, is a 
hypothetical world, and not an argument providing a ra- 
tionale of the world as it is. In the world as it is, moral 

1 Vide supra, pp. 21 1 f. 

[275] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

beings die, and it is not saying anything to them to say that 
they die as natural and not as moral, for to their own con- 
sciousness their being does not submit to any such analysis; 
it is indivisibly one, and whatever befalls it must be inter- 
preted within the unity of its moral consciousness. To 
put it otherwise, the truth that death is the debt of nature 
does not exclude the idea that it is the wages of sin; no 
interpretation of it can possibly be adequate if the natural 
necessity does not become morally significant. And if a 
real relation between death and sin is not refuted by argu- 
ments like these, just as little is it refuted by showing that 
in any given case death may be not a defeat or a doom, but 
a triumph. This is true, and every death for others or for 
a cause illustrates its truth. But it is a triumph over death 
itself as a real enemy, and it has already been shown that 
any such triumph over death is at the same time a triumph 
over sin ; in other words, that it assumes the very connec- 
tion which it is here adduced to disprove. Fundamentally, 
the question at issue is an aspect of that which has already 
been discussed in a more general form: namely, whether 
there is or is not a divine reaction against sin, not limited 
to conscience, or to the purely spiritual world, as it is some- 
times called, but pervading the world of reality in all its 
dimensions. We have seen cause to answer this question in 
the affirmative, and the validity of the answer is here as- 
sumed. But the conviction it represents is based on 
moral experiences, and we can refer to moral experience in 
Paul as the key to his declaration that the wages of sin is 
death. "When the commandment came," he writes, "sin 
sprang to life, and I died" (Rom. vii. 9). The "I" is expressed 
in Greek, and has the emphasis of some tragic recollection 
in it. As sin came to life, the sinner tasted death. Here 

[276] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

also it is a mistake to be analytic, and to say that the death 
meant can only be moral or spiritual death, because the 
apostle was physically alive long after the experience referred 
to. Such distinctions are foreign to his thought, and do 
not give us the key to his experience. What he felt when 
he was conscious that sin was alive in him was that this 
was fatal. His doom was sealed. Things like what he had 
done had no right to be, and those who did them had no 
right to be either. They knew the just appointment of God, 
that those who do such things are worthy of death (Rom. 
i. 32). They did not know it from Gen. iii. or from any 
Scripture, but by that immediate intuition which assured 
them that in the world of God such things and such people 
had no permanent place. God was against them. The in- 
most nature of things was against them. The sentence might 
not be executed speedily, but it was irrevocably pronounced : 
the end of those things was death (Rom. vi. 21 ). 

It is only as part of the whole to which such ideas are 
native and self-evident that we can take in what the New 
Testament tells us of the death of Christ as a death for sin. 
A martyr's death, heroic and inspiring as it may be, is not 
in this sense a death for sin. It may quite well be a death 
for righteousness. It may quite well be a death from which 
others reap spiritual benefits, benefits of which the martyrdom 
may be called the price. The death of Jesus was of course 
a martyr's death, and has this heroic and inspiring quality; 
no doubt also, like every great act of self-sacrifice, it has 
bought advantages for the race. But this is not only un- 
equal to what the New Testament means, when it says that 
He bore our sins, or that He suffered for sins once, the just 
for the unjust, and that He made purgation of sins, or that 
He put away sin by His sacrifice, or that He is the Lamb of 

[277] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

God which taketh away the sin of the world; it does not 
even point in the direction of these characteristic New Testa- 
ment utterances. They all assume, in the death of Jesus, 
a relation to sin which has no parallel in martyrdom. On 
the cross the sinless Son of God, in love to man and in obedi- 
ence to the Father, entered submissively into that tragic 
experience in which sinful men realise all that sin means. 
He tasted death for every man. The last and deepest thing 
we can say about His relation to our sins is that He died for 
them, that He bore them in His own body on the tree: if 
we could not say this, we could not say that He knew by 
experience all that sinful men find to be involved in their 
sin, nor could we say that He had been made perfect in love. 
There are two things which for some time have led to the 
depreciation of this vital centre of the doctrine of recon- 
ciliation. One is the extraordinary tendency in some minds 
to make light of death. We hear it spoken of as if it were 
nothing in itself, an insignificant incident, a mere point of 
transition with no critical importance and no profound or 
dreadful content. The writer can only say that this is a 
state of mind which seems incomprehensible to him in any- 
body who has ever seen death. Of all human experiences 
it is the most solemn and tremendous, and that from which 
nature most instinctively recoils. It is the greatest thought 
of which we are capable, except the thought of God, and it 
is the extreme opposite of the thought of God. It is neither 
true humanity nor sound Christianity which ignores this. St. 
Paul can cry in a moment of rapture, when the mystery of 
the life to come has been revealed to him, "Where, death, 
is thy victory*? where, death, thy sting?" But he knows 
also that death is the last enemy that shall be destroyed. 
He can speak of the body of our humiliation, and of the 

[278] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

sowing in corruption, in weakness, in dishonour. In the 
most happy or the most glorious conditions, the death of a 
spiritual being has an inevitable indignity and humiliation 
in it; we feel it is revoltingly out of keeping in a nature 
akin to God. The sense of this must have been peculiarly 
profound in those who watched Jesus die on the cross, and 
it may have been through it that the apostles perceived that 
the key to the inconceivable indignities and sufferings He 
endured could only be found in this, that He was bearing 
the sin of the whole world. All that sin in the last resort 
meant for men was being experienced and exhausted there. 
The agony and the shame were intelligible to them in this 
view, and not otherwise. 

The other influence which tends to the depreciation of this 
central truth of the New Testament comes from the idea that 
it must have been impossible for Christ to taste what death 
is to the sinful, because He knew no sin. It is the shadow 
of the bad conscience cast on what is in itself natural and 
morally neutral which makes death dreadful to the sinner. 
But Jesus had no bad conscience, and no black shadow, there- 
fore, can have fallen on death for Him. He must have died 
as the happy warrior dies in the poem, who, 

" While the mortal mist is gathering, draws 
His breath in confidence of heaven's applause." 

But we know that this is not true. Without denying that 
His death could be described in this key, and celebrated as a 
triumph over sin, we must repeat that it is presented in the 
gospels primarily as a tragedy in which He gave Himself up 
to awful divine necessities. But granting this, it is not for any 
one to settle beforehand how far it was possible for Him, sin- 
less as He was, to enter by dying into the experiences which 

[279] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

death is for sinners, to whom it is in some way one with 
sin. We may be sure that in His unity of will with the 
holy God, in whose world and by whose will sin is fatal, 
and in His unity of nature and of love with sinful men, 
whose whole life was crushed by this fatality, He realised 
in a way transcending all our measures the doom which sin 
had brought upon our race. It is only in going through such 
an experience that He is perfected in love. It is in view of 
such an experience that John writes : Herein is love, not that 
we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son a pro- 
pitiation for our sins. 

Both these conceptions of the death of Christ as the basis 
of reconciliation — the abstract one, which lays all the em- 
phasis on what it characterises as spiritual in the death ; and 
the concrete, to which the death itself is as essential as any 
spiritual content which can be distinguished from it — are 
capable of being perverted, and a glance at the commonest 
perversions will bring out the significance of each in a new 
light. The purely spiritual view lends itself readily to those 
who are disposed to obliterate the distinction between the 
Redeemer and the redeemed. It is revealed without dis- 
guise in an American theologian who tells us that "the diffi- 
culty largest in size is our lack of redeemers" : we ought all 
to be, and so few of us are, Redeemers, Saviours, Christs. 
It is not merely cowardice, or self-indulgent shrinking from 
the cross, which makes such language repellent. It is 
hideously out of tune with the New Testament, and there 
must be something in what leads to it which is inadequate 
to the New Testament truth. Christ has done something 
for us which gives Him His place for ever as the only Re- 
deemer of men, and, no matter how thoroughly under His 
inspiration we are changed into His likeness, we never cease 

[280] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

to be the redeemed nor invade His solitary place. The fact 
that a "purely spiritual" conception of the atonement tends 
to overbalance itself in this direction is an indication that 
something is wanting in it. 

On the other hand, the concrete view, to which the death 
itself, as the gospels present it, without any distinction of 
spiritual or physical elements, is of vital importance, can be 
perverted in another way. Its self-containedness, its out- 
wardness, its historical character, can be emphasised as though 
it availed for us simply in itself, unconditionally, without 
any relation to our attitude to it. Men may say, There is 
the atonement — there, outside of us. Christ is our substi- 
tute, and there is not another word to be said. He suffered 
that we might be exempted from suffering. He made Him- 
self a sacrifice for sin, that for us sacrifice might be abolished. 
He took our responsibilities on Himself that we might have 
no responsibility more. What His death does is to secure 
impunity for sin; our punishment is transferred to Him, 
and the penal consequences of sin need not trouble us fur- 
ther. 

It cannot be denied that this perversion of the truth 
that Christ died for our sins has actually emerged in human 
experience. The heart is deceitful above all things, and des- 
perately wicked, and it does not stick at corrupting the best 
into the worst. Even in the apostolic age the thought came 
to the surface, "Let us continue in sin that grace may 
abound." But this perversion has not been so common as 
is sometimes supposed. It has indeed been charged from 
the beginning against what may be called the evangelical 
doctrine of atonement, but as an actual or possible result 
of it in practice, rather than as something tc which it led 
in principle. From Faustus Socinus to the present day 

[281] 






THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the charge has been familiar. In one way it is conspicuously 
unfair. It allows that the conception of Christ as a sub- 
stitute operates as a motive, but it assumes that it must 
always operate as an immoral motive. It represents those 
who think of Christ on His cross as their substitute as though 
they were of necessity scoundrels or sneaks, who sought and 
found nothing in the atonement but a way to continue in 
sin and escape the consequences. But this is mere unintelli- 
gent slander. The conception of Christ as the sinner's sub- 
stitute may be inadequate to the truth, but it is absurd to 
say that when it becomes a motive it can only be a motive 
to vice. In an honest heart it is a motive to gratitude, 
to love, to devotion, and there have been countless honest 
hearts among those whose Christian theology has been con- 
densed in this much-censured term. The very fact that it 
precludes the idea that the Christian himself is to become 
a Christ or a Redeemer is proof that in it, and in the con- 
crete view of the death of Christ on which it rests, there is 
something which does greater justice to the New Testa- 
ment than is done by the purely spiritual view. And if the 
term itself is objectionable, as admitting of equivocal in- 
ferences, it only prompts us to look for better terms which 
will preclude such inferences, without imperilling the truth 
which, with whatever drawbacks, the term in question covers. 
The matter may be put thus. The concrete view of Christ's 
death, and the conception of it as in some sense substitu- 
tionary, cover the truth that there is something from which 
Christ's death saves the sinner. It does not save him un- 
conditionally, or apart from any relation he assumes to it; 
and in the following lecture the conditions on which the 
Saviour's death avails for salvation will be considered. But 
it does save the sinner from something. There is some- 

[282] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

thing from which he is exempted — the due conditions being 
fulfilled — by the death of Jesus. In other words, Jesus died 
for him, in an irreducible sense of these words; He died 
for him in a sense and with a potential result which can 
never be ascribed to any action or experience of his own or 
of others, but only and for ever to the death of Jesus itself. 
If the question is put, What, then, is it which we are spared 
or saved from by the death of Jesus — what is it that we do 
not experience because He died? — the answer is that He 
saves us from dying in our sins. But for His death we should 
have died in our sins ; we should have passed into the black- 
ness of darkness with the condemnation of God abiding on 
us. It is because He died for us, and for no other reason, 
that the darkness has passed away, and a light shines in 
which we have peace with God and rejoice in hope of His 
glory. On the basis of the New Testament, of Christian ex- 
perience, and of a theistic view of nature to which the sepa- 
ration of physical and spiritual cannot be the final truth, 
the writer has done what he can to indicate the rationale 
of this; but imperfect as all such attempts must be, their 
imperfection does not shake the conviction that they are at- 
tempts to deal with a fact, and that fact the one which 
is vital to Christianity. There are two characteristics of 
New Testament religion which confirm, as they are only 
intelligible under this view of the facts. The first is its deep 
and ever present sense of debt to Christ. This pervades 
the New Testament throughout, but is most vivid and in- 
tense in presence of the cross. It is the inspiration of those 
doxologies to the Redeemer, which are the very signature 
of the new religion. And there is no adequate explanation 
of this feeling which does not recognise that it is thanks to 
the cross and to what was once for all suffered there, that 

[283] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the doom with which sin threatened our life is lifted, that 
fear is expelled, and that faith in the love of God fills the 
heart in its stead. Further, New Testament religion is char- 
acterised by a kind of assurance — an initial assurance, on 
which it is sustained from the outset — which cannot be ex- 
plained at all except on the assumption that the one thing 
needful for the salvation of sinners was once for all done 
and endured at the cross. No matter how potent the Passion 
of Christ may be as a motive to reproduce in us its own 
characteristic moral qualities, the Christian attitude to it 
is not that of repeating it; it is that of depending upon it, 
believing in it, trusting to it to the uttermost. Of course it is 
a motive of transcendent power, but it is its completeness and 
finality in itself which make it such a motive, and it is as 
final and complete in itself that the apostles contemplate it. 
When we alter the order, the balance, or the proportion of 
those truths, we are apt to get into an atmosphere which is 
not that of the New Testament. This is felt even in a book 
so profoundly spiritual and Christian as Moberly's Atone- 
ment and Personality. The great word of the New Testa- 
ment, when the conditions of salvation are concerned, is 
faith ; but faith is a term which hardly figures in Dr. Mober- 
ly's exposition at all. He is preoccupied with penitence, with 
experiences of the soul in relation to sin, not with faith, the 
experience of the soul in relation to the Saviour. There is 
no initial assurance in Christianity as he unfolds it, and 
even a reader who is conscious that faith without penitence 
is not faith but presumption, cannot get over the feeling 
that, as compared with that of the New Testament, the 
Christianity Dr. Moberly expounds has no pulse. We lose 
contact with the New Testament utterly unless we can say 
from the beginning that because of what Christ suffered for 

[284] 



RECONCILIATION AS ACHIEVED BY CHRIST 

us, and on that ground alone, the doom of sin is no longer 
the doom of those who believe on Him. "Who is he that 
condemneth? Think of Christ who died!" The Christian 
life has a beginning as well as a goal, and there is an exulta- 
tion that belongs to the starting on the race as well as to the 
finishing of the course. There is not only a rejoicing in God 
who will perfect that which concerns us, but a rejoicing in 
God who justifies the ungodly. To depress or extinguish 
this latter joy is not only to take away all that can be called 
gospel from sinners, it is to deny its proper meaning and 
virtue to the Passion of Jesus. 1 

1 It is naturally impossible for any one to write a book on the atonement 
and not mention faith, and there are one or two explicit references to it in 
Atonement and Personality. Thus on p. 284 we read: "It is not by becoming 
like Him that men will approach towards incorporation with Him; but by 
result of incorporation with Him, received in faith as a gift, and in faith 
adored, and used, that they will become like Him." But even this, highly 
equivocal as it is, stands practically alone. There is nothing which answers 
to the fact that in the New Testament f^eravoeip and (xerdpeta occur in all 
55 times, but ttUttls and irio-Tefeiv 470 times. 



[285] 



CHAPTER VI 
RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

What has been before us in the previous chapter is recon- 
ciliation conceived as the finished work of Christ. It is not 
a work, so far, which sinners do, nor which is done in them; 
it is a finished work which is done for them. The legitimacy 
and necessity of this point of view it is vain to dispute. No 
one, however, questions that the finished work of Christ 
must in some way become effective for sinners — must in 
some way become a power in their lives — if reconciliation 
is to be realised in their experience. In other words, it 
must somehow be mediated to them, and this is the subject 
we have now to consider. We cannot evade it by thinking 
of the sinner as immediately or unconditionally involved in 
Christ's work. We cannot evade it, for example, by speak- 
ing of Christ's humanity as not individual but inclusive, so 
that it was not so truly He who achieved the work of recon- 
ciliation as the human race in Him; and by then inferring 
from this assumed metaphysical unity of the sinner with 
the Saviour all Christian experiences of reconciliation and 
salvation. To do this is really to abandon the ground of 
experience at the very point at which it is both necessary 
and possible to adhere to it most closely. The message of 
the gospel — the word of reconciliation, as Paul calls it — is 
not the message of what we have done in Christ, it is the 
message of what Christ has done for us, and especially of 

[286] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

what He has done for us in His death; and the question 
that remains for our consideration is not one of metaphysics, 
but of simple fact and experience: How does what Christ 
did for us, especially on the cross, become a power in our 
life*? A "power" is the New Testament name for it. "I am 
not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to 
salvation to every one who believes" (Rom. i. 16). "The 
word of the cross is to those who perish folly, but to us who 
are saved it is the power of God" ( 1 Cor. i. 18). 

It is perhaps necessary to remark that when we speak of 
a finished work of Christ we do not think of separating the 
work from Him who achieved it. The New Testament 
knows only of a living Christ, and all apostolic preaching 
of the gospel holds up the living Christ to men. But the 
living Christ is Christ who died, and He is never preached 
apart from His death and from its reconciling power. It 
is the living Christ, with the virtue of His reconciling death 
in Him, who is the burden of the apostolic message, and 
nothing could be more curiously unlike the New Testa- 
ment than to use the resurrection to belittle or disparage 
the death. 1 The task of the evangelist is to preach Christ — 
of course the living Christ — but in His character as the 
Crucified; it is to set Him forth in his message, as God 
has set Him forth already in fact, as "a propitiation, through 
faith, in His blood." This is the word of reconciliation in 
the sense of the New Testament, and the Pauline expres- 
sion just quoted points to the way in which the reconcilia- 
tion achieved by Christ avails and becomes effective for 
sinful men. It is through faith. Faith fills the New Testa- 
Ms, for example, in Lofthouse, Ethics and Atonement, p. 191: "St. Paul 
never forgets that the resurrection would have been impossible without the 
death; but the value of the death is that it made possible the resurrection." 

[287] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

ment as completely as Christ does; it is the correlative of 
Christ wherever Christ really touches the life of men. It 
is not an arbitrary condition on which forgiveness is granted, 
or on which the reconciliation achieved by Christ is held 
to apply to sinners; it is that for which Christ, as the author 
of the work of reconciliation, by the nature of the case ap- 
peals, and when His appeal is met by the response of faith, 
the faith itself is natural, spontaneous, and in a sense in- 
evitable. It is the right reaction to a new reality brought 
into the sinner's environment— a new reality so profound 
and final that the right reaction to it completely transforms 
him, making him in Scripture language a new creature (2 
Cor. v. 17; Gal. vi. 15). 

It is important to get rid of the idea that there is anything 
arbitrary in faith — that it is a condition to which it has 
pleased God, for reasons best known to Himself, to attach 
man's salvation, but which, so far as we can see, might just 
as well have been anything else. It is ideas of this kind 
which make faith itself a doubtful and uncertain quantity; 
which raise all sorts of unreal questions as to whether any 
alleged faith is of the proper kind ; which get lost in attempts 
to distinguish between faith and works, inasmuch as this 
arbitrarily demanded faith is itself but a kind of work, on 
which salvation is made legally dependent; and which, 
worse than all, inevitably leave something artificial in the 
connection between faith and salvation, an artificiality re- 
vealed in all the distinctions between imputed righteous- 
ness and infused righteousness, or between the righteous- 
ness of faith and that of life, or between justification and 
sanctification, as things which must indeed both be pro- 
vided for, but which have no natural, vital, or organic 
connection with each other. This perplexing and some- 

[288] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

times repellent part of the field of theology is cleared and 
simplified when we see that there is nothing arbitrary in 
faith, and that it is not so much a condition on which 
salvation is by the will of God made to depend, as the one 
natural and inevitable way in which the salvation of God, 
present in Christ, is and must be accepted by men. When 
a man has heard the story of Jesus and the gospel inter- 
pretation of it — when he takes in the truth that what is 
before him on the cross is the revelation of a love in God 
deeper and stronger than sin, entering into all that sin means 
for him and taking the burden of it, in all its dreadful pres- 
sure, upon itself, yet clinging to him through it all, and 
making to him the final appeal which God can make — what 
is he to do? What does the situation require of him? Is it 
legitimate or becoming for him to say that such a revela- 
tion of love is unnecessary for him, or irrelevant to his re- 
quirements? To say so would be to say that he had no 
sin, or none with which he did not feel competent to deal 
without such aid. Is it legitimate for him to say that such 
a revelation of love is too much, and to attempt negotia- 
tions with God on the assumption that further consideration 
might discover a way of salvation costing less to God, and 
not so overwhelming to the sinner? Or can he surround 
the word of reconciliation with conditions of his own, and 
refuse to take the benefit of God's reconciling love till he 
has provided moral guarantees that it will not be abused — 
whether the guarantees are supposed to be given in a suffi- 
cient repentance for past sins, or in a sufficient amendment 
of life for the future? All these suppositions are impossible. 
If a man with the sense of his sin on him sees what Christ 
on His cross means, there is only one thing for him to do — 
one thing which is inevitably demanded in that moral situa- 

[289] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

tion: to abandon himself to the sin-bearing love which ap- 
peals to Him in Christ, and to do so unreservedly, uncon- 
ditionally, and for ever. This is what the New Testament 
means by faith. It is the only thing which is true to the 
situation in which the sinner finds himself when he is con- 
fronted with Christ and the work of reconciliation achieved 
by Him. To believe in Christ and in the sin-bearing love 
revealed in Him is to do the one right thing for which the 
situation calls. When the sinner does thus believe he does 
the one right thing, and it puts him right with God; in St. 
Paul's language he is justified by faith. God accepts him 
as righteous, and he is righteous; he has received the recon- 
ciliation (Rom. v. 11), and he is reconciled. It is quite 
needless to complicate this simple situation by discussing 
such questions as whether justification is "forensic," or has 
some other character, say "real" or "vital," to which "foren- 
sic" is more or less of a contrast. Even if Paul envisaged 
men, as he undoubtedly sometimes did, as standing at God's 
bar, it does not follow that this situation suggested any 
such contrasts to his mind. Even in the fora of men, the 
degree to which the "forensic" emerges is very different. 
There are some in which very abstract and superficial aspects 
of reality are alone open to consideration, and their verdicts 
and sentences may be in a high degree "forensic." There 
may be a wide gulf between the justification — if it should 
so be — pronounced in such fora, and the verdict of God or 
of conscience upon the case. But in the forum of God, at 
the bar of His tribunal, no occasion can arise for drawing 
such distinctions. It is nothing superficial or imperfectly 
real about God which is revealed in the work of reconcilia- 
tion achieved by Christ; on the contrary, it is the ultimate 
truth of the divine nature; the deepest thing we can ever 

[290] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

know about God is that there is love in Him which bears 
in all its reality the sin of the world. And there is nothing 
superficial in what the New Testament calls faith, in its 
relation to this ultimate truth in God; on the contrary, 
faith exhausts in itself the being of man in this direction; 
it is his absolute committal of himself for ever to the sin- 
bearing love of God for salvation. It is not simply the act 
of an instant, it is the attitude of a life; it is the one right 
thing at the moment when a man abandons himself to Christ, 
and it is the one thing which keeps him right with God for 
ever. It is just as truly the whole of Christianity subjec- 
tively as Christ is the whole of it objectively, and it is no 
more lawful to supplement or to eke out faith than to supple- 
ment or to eke out Christ. Luther is abundantly right in 
his emphasis on faith alone. It is just the other side of 
Christ alone. Every Christian experience whatsoever — call 
it justification, adoption, or sanctification — call it love, or 
repentance, or regeneration, or the Spirit — lies within faith 
and is dependent upon it. The virtue of all observances, 
sacramental or other, is conditioned by it. No doubt, as a 
term in ordinary use, it is found in the New Testament in 
narrower meanings and with more restricted applications; 
but where Christ or the gospel is the object of faith, faith is 
as comprehensive as Christ or the gospel, and as little raises 
any questions about what is or is not merely forensic in 
its issues. It is what the situation demands, and the be- 
liever is not one who is reputed to be, but one who in his 
very being as a believer actually is, right with God. There 
is no legal fiction in the matter to explain or to overcome; 
if we think in terms of a forum — which we may do if we 
please — we must remember that the forum is that of God, 
and that the verdict there is always "according to truth." 

[291] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

When He pronounces the sinner SUaios, he is dUaLos. 
Before he saw Christ and believed in Him he was all wrong 
with God: God could do nothing but condemn him. Now, 
in virtue of his faith, he is all right with God, and there is 
henceforth no condemnation for him. Nor in all this is 
there anything unreal, anything akin to legal fiction, and 
needing to be supplemented or transcended by something 
going beyond faith. Nothing can by any possibility go 
beyond faith, and the whole promise and potency of Chris- 
tianity are present in it. The sinner who through faith is 
right with God is certainly not made perfect in holiness, 
but the power which alone can make him perfect is already 
really and vitally operative in him. And it is operative in 
him only in and through his faith. 

Ever since the word of reconciliation was preached by 
the apostles there have been perplexities and confusions 
about the relation of the different stages in the Christian 
life, and especially, to borrow the words in their ordinary 
Protestant sense, about the relation of justification to sancti- 
fication. St. Paul's gospel of justification by faith apart 
from works of law was construed by some as if it meant a 
privilege to continue in sin; they saw nothing in justifica- 
tion or forgiveness or faith which essentially or inevitably 
guaranteed a good life. Those interpreters who find in the 
sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters of Romans not the ex- 
planation of what is implicit in the third, fourth, and fifth, 
but an addition or supplement to them, in which baptism, 
or the Spirit, or union with Christ is introduced as a new 
power to guarantee what is not guaranteed by Christ the 
propitiation and by faith in Him, virtually take the same 
position. The "forensic" gospel of justification is for them 
replaced or eked out by the "ethical" gospel of mystical 

[292] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

union with Christ in His death and resurrection; but it is a 
real case of replacement or eking out; there is no vital or 
necessary connection between the two things. This is a 
point of such importance that it is worth while dwelling 
on it. 

The primary interest of it is its bearing on the proper 
temper of the Christian life, and especially on the place of 
assurance in it. When we think of the process in which 
reconciliation works itself out from day to day and year to 
year, we arc face to face with something which is not yet 
complete; indeed the question forces itself on us whether it 
can ever be complete on earth. Is not the issue of it, to the 
last, ambiguous? Can we prevent uncertainty, suspense, 
and fear hanging over all our life 4 ? We are not really and 
fully right with God; the best we can do is to hope that 
some day we may be; to hope — and also to fear. In the 
Church of Rome, and to a considerable extent in the Anglican 
Church, this temper has predominated. Assurance has been 
dreaded as lending itself too readily to presumption. It 
cannot be denied that both the New Testament and human 
experience speak gravely of the possibilities in this direction. 
Paul himself practised the severest self-discipline, lest having 
preached to others he himself should be rejected (l Cor. ix. 
24-27). But neither can it be denied that the temper of 
timidity, suspense, and uncertainty is not that which pre- 
dominates in the New Testament. The great awe of the 
judgment to come does not tell on the believing mind as a 
power which calls into doubt the reconciling love of God in 
Christ, or deprives the believer of his joy in it. Rather are 
we astounded by the assurance with which the apostles 
speak both of the present and of the future. "Being justified 
by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus 

[293] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this 
grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of 
God" (Rom. v. l f.). "It is God that justifieth: who is he 
that shall condemn?" (Rom. viii. 33). "I am persuaded 
that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, 
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate 
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. viii. 
38 f.). The emotion is not the same, but John also can 
speak of having "boldness in the day of judgment" (1 John 
iv. 17), and again of "having boldness and not being ashamed 
before Him at His coming" (ib. ii. 28). The tone and tem- 
per of these passages are not characteristic of the historical 
Churches mentioned, as they are of the New Testament; and 
the reason seems to be that amid the contingencies and perils 
of common life they have allowed Christ and faith, in 
their New Testament dimensions, to fall more into the 
background than they do in the apostolic writings. They 
attempt, so to speak, to justify justification too much on 
the ground of what has been accomplished, or is one day to 
be accomplished, in the justified, though as yet it can only 
be seen in germ or promise, and too little on the ground 
of what Christ has accomplished once for all, and of the 
faith which His achievement perpetually wins anew from the 
sinful soul. 

If we turn to typical Reformation preachers or theologians, 
we see the other side of the shield. Luther and those who 
learned from him were conscious that they were getting a 
sight of the gospel such as they had never had before, and 
such as made all things new for them. It gave them what 
their sinful souls needed and craved for, but what they could 
never find in any system of ecclesiastical observances, how- 

[294] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

ever venerable, nor by any moral efforts of their own, how- 
ever sincere. It gave them an initial religious assurance, 
in the strength of which — and only in the strength of which 
• — a new life was possible for them ; it filled their souls from 
the outset with peace, joy, and hope. This initial religious 
assurance— this assurance of justification, not as God's ver- 
dict at the close of a perfect life, but as God's free un- 
merited mercy to the believing sinner, through which alone 
he could set out on life, finding the gate of righteousness 
which he had shut in his own face thrown by redeeming 
love wide open — this initial religious assurance is the essen- 
tial mark of Reformation Christianity. The faith in which 
it is involved is not to be defined by reference to any theo- 
logical or scholastic standard; it is not any attitude to a 
creed; it is the whole being and attitude of the soul as 
determined by the sin-bearing love of God in Christ. That 
love, and that love alone, evokes it, and on that love and that 
alone it rests. But just for that reason it keeps that love 
separate from everything else — separate even from its own 
consequences in the believing soul. When it believes in it, 
we may almost say it is for what it is, not for what it does. 
The soul does not first scrutinise itself, and, when it has 
discovered in itself sufficient traces of Christ's power to trans- 
form it, yield Him thereafter a proportionate faith, or feel 
entitled to a proportionate assurance; the moment it sees 
what Christ is and means, that moment it abandons itself 
passionately and unreservedly to Him, and it is solely on 
what He is that it rests its assured hope for ever. That it 
will be like Him one day is guaranteed to faith by what 
He is. 

It is a crude way of putting this, to say that the interest 
of the Reformation was primarily religious rather than 

!>95] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

moral. But though it is crude, it is not untrue. No doubt 
religion must be ethical through and through, and it was 
through the needs of the moral nature that the eyes of the 
Reformers were opened to the true import of the gospel. But 
religion must also in some sense transcend morality, or it 
has no raison d'etre. It must deal with moral failure, and 
have power to renew the moral life when it has been dis- 
comfited and driven to despair. This was clearly seen by 
the Reformers, and it is their glory to have asserted it; but 
it became the fault of later Protestantism that, in its desire 
to safeguard the initial religious assurance apart from which 
the new life cannot be launched — a thoroughly legitimate 
and essential object if New Testament Christianity was to 
survive — it lost at least in some quarters the sense that to 
this initial religious assurance the new life was immediately 
and vitally related. It thought more about Christ than it 
did about the new creature, and faith tended to become in- 
tellectualised ; faith was rather the acceptance of true 
thoughts about revelation than the sudden and irresistible 
conquest of the whole being by the Redeemer. This was a 
Romish rather than a Reformation idea of faith; and when 
it made way in the Protestant Churches, and overlaid the 
original Reformation idea, which was also that of the New 
Testament, it found these Churches less protected than the 
Romish Church, by their constitution and discipline, against 
some practical abuses to which it led. Thus it was quite 
natural, and it seemed a right way of honouring the Saviour, 
to distinguish that initial justification or acceptance with 
God, which is as complete in itself as the sin-bearing love 
on which it rests, from the painfully acquired sanctification 
which no doubt is conditioned by it, but which is permanently 
incomplete. It was natural to do this, and to contrast the 

[296] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

perfect work of Christ, and our absolute dependence on it, 
with the imperfect work which in a sense is our achieve- 
ment as well as His. But though this was natural, there 
was something in it radically unsound. The only justifi- 
cation of which the New Testament speaks is justification 
of life (Rom. v. 18); what Paul does with his faith is to 
live by it (Gal. ii. 20). There is no religious assurance con- 
templated by the apostles which is not ipso facto a new 
moral power. Protestantism has had its saints, whatever 
the ignorant may say, but the candid student of theologi- 
cal history will admit, what great and simple souls like Chal- 
mers have avowed, that it has suffered from the tendency 
to dwell on the initial religious assurance — on faith and 
justification — too abstractly, and with too little regard to 
its spontaneous and inevitable outcome in the new life. It 
has exhausted itself in attempts to distinguish justification 
from sanctification, partly to give Christ all the glory which 
is His due as the sin-bearer, partly to safeguard for the sin- 
ner an assurance of mercy not dependent on his own achieve- 
ments; and in these quite intelligible and legitimate inter- 
ests it has sometimes forgotten that the great matter is not 
the distinction of justification and sanctification, but their 
connection, and that justification or reconciliation is a de- 
lusion unless the life of the reconciled and justified is in- 
evitably and naturally a holy life. 

In the Romish Church, when the Reformation brought on 
a crisis in its history, the interest was different. Those who 
in the sixteenth century adhered to the existing order, did 
not, like Luther, and those who learned from him, get a 
new vision of Christ, which made all things new, and brought 
an infinite emancipation and joy to the sinful soul. It was 
their task to guard with anxious care a vast institution 

[297] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

with which, as they might assert, the moral wellbeing of 
humanity was bound up; and from this point of view it 
might be said that the interest of the Romish Church was 
in morality rather than religion. It is indeed paradoxical 
to say this of a Church which owed so much to two of the 
most infamous institutions in the moral history of mankind, 
the Spanish Inquisition and the Society of Jesus; but it 
will not be misunderstood by any one who studies the Canons 
and Decrees of the Council of Trent on the subject of justi- 
fication. In the seventh chapter of the sixth session of the 
Council there is an elaborate statement of what justification 
is which may be cited in illustration. Barring the sacra- 
mental part of it, it has often appealed even to Protestants 
as at once comprehensive and cautious, doing justice to some 
things which in the exuberant utterance of revival-preachers, 
like Paul and Luther, were perhaps not explicitly enough 
regarded, and shutting up beforehand a variety of bypaths 
down which heedless souls might be tempted by the flesh 
or the devil. Justification itself — which is here assumed to 
be the state of the man reconciled to God through faith in 
Christ — is defined as "not remission of sins merely, but also 
the sanctification and renewal of the inward man through 
the voluntary reception of the graces and gifts whereby 
man of unjust becomes just, and of an enemy a friend, that 
so he may be an heir according to the hope of life everlast- 
ing. Of this justification the causes are these: the final 
cause indeed is the glory of God and of Jesus Christ, and 
life everlasting; while the efficient cause is a merciful God 
who washes and sanctifies gratuitously, sealing and anointing 
with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the pledge of our in- 
heritance; the meritorious cause is His most beloved only 
begotten, our Lord Jesus Christ, who when we were sinners, 

[298] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

for the exceeding charity with which He loved us, merited 
justification for us by His most holy Passion on the wood of 
the cross, and made satisfaction for us unto God the Father ; 
the instrumental cause is the sacrament of baptism, which 
is the sacrament of faith, without which [faith] no man was 
ever justified; lastly, the alone formal cause is the justice 
of God, not that whereby He Himself is just, but that where- 
by He maketh us just, that, to wit, with which we, being en- 
dowed by Him, are renewed in the spirit of our mind, and are 
not only reputed but are truly called and are just, receiving 
justice within us, each one according to his own measure, 
which the Holy Ghost distributes to every one as He wills, 
and according to each man's disposition and co-operation. 
For although no one can be just, but he to whom the merits 
of our Lord Jesus Christ are communicated, yet is this done 
in the said justification of the impious when, by the merit 
of that same holy Passion, the charity of God is poured forth 
by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of those that are justified, 
and is inherent therein: whence man, through Jesus Christ, 
in whom he is ingrafted, receives in the said justification, 
together with the remission of sins, all these [gifts] infused 
at once, faith, hope, and charity. For faith, unless hope and 
chanty be added thereto, neither unites man perfectly with 
Christ, nor makes him a living member of His body. For 
which reason it is most truly said, that Faith without works 
is dead and profitless; and, In Christ Jesus neither circum- 
cision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but faith which 
worketh by charity. This faith catechumens beg of the Church 
— agreeably to a tradition of the apostles — previously to 
the sacrament of baptism; when they beg for the faith 
which bestows life everlasting, which without hope and 
charity faith cannot bestow; whence also do they immedi- 

[299] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

ately hear that word of Christ: If thou wilt enter into life, 
keep the commandments :" 1 

This exhaustive analysis and definition, in which all the 
"causes" of justification are precisely distinguished — final, 
efficient, meritorious, instrumental, and formal — may be 
said to aim at doing justice to every aspect of the 
truth, religious and ethical alike; but its controversial 
purpose is unquestionable. It is aimed at the Protestant 
conception of justification, which was regarded as failing to 
safeguard moral interests, and as maintaining a faith or a 
religion in which ethical distinctions ceased to count. In 
this sense it may be said that the interest emphasised here is 
the moral one which the Reformation was charged with 
neglecting. Justification is defined not as remission of sins 
merely — this was assumed to be the Lutheran definition — 
but as the sanctification and renewal of the inward man, 
through the voluntary reception of the graces and gifts 
whereby man of unjust became just, and so on. But legiti- 
mate as the interest in the new life is — and legitimate also 
as is the resolve to connect it immediately and vitally with 
justification — it cannot be admitted that the way in which 
this legitimate interest and resolve are here satisfied has 
any analogy in the New Testament. The faith which is 
here spoken of — a faith which catechumens seek from the 
Church before baptism ex apostolorum traditione, and to 
which hope and charity have somehow to be added — has no 
definable relation to the faith which in St. Paul (and in Ref- 
ormation religion) is the sum total of Christian life, the indi- 
visible and all-inclusive response of the soul to Christ. In spite 

J The translation is borrowed, with the single change of signing into seal- 
ing (for signans), from Schaff, The Creeds of the Greek and Latin Churches, 
pp. 94 ff. 

[300] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

of the mention of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the exceed- 
ing charity with which He loved us, it is not recognised that 
the soul's response to that love, its abandonment to it as 
the last reality in God — which the New Testament calls 
faith — must have love as of its very essence. To speak of 
love as some kind of plus to faith is to depart at once from 
the facts and the language of the New Testament. But 
the fundamental objection to the way in which the new life 
is safeguarded in the Tridentine definition is that with its 
references to graces and gifts, such as love and hope, which 
must be added to faith to make the new life secure, it is 
operating with categories which are inadequate to the per- 
sonal relations of the soul and Christ in which alone that 
life is realised. Grace is not a thing which can be infused, 
nor is there any meaning in such an expression as that love 
is inherent in the heart; there are no gifts of grace which, 
so to speak, can be lodged bodily in the soul. Grace is the 
attitude of God to man which is revealed and made sure 
in Christ, and the only way in which it becomes effective 
in us for new life is when it wins for us the response of faith. 
And just as grace is the whole attitude of God in Christ to 
sinful men, so faith is the whole attitude of the sinful soul 
as it surrenders itself to that grace. Whether we call it 
the life of the justified, or the life of the reconciled, or the 
life of the regenerate, or the life of grace or of love, the new 
life is the life of faith and nothing else. To maintain the 
original attitude of welcoming God's love as it is revealed 
in Christ bearing our sins — not only to trust it, but to go 
on trusting — not merely to believe in it as a mode of transi- 
tion from the old to the new, but to keep on believing — to 
say with every breath we draw, "Thou, O Christ, art all I 
want; more than all in Thee I find" — is not a part of the 

[3oi] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

Christian life but the whole of it. It does not need to be* 
and cannot be, supplemented or eked out by "gifts" and 
"graces." All gifts and graces are where Christ is, and faith 
is the indivisible acceptance of them all in Him. Every- 
thing is present in faith — not indeed as something begged 
from the Church ex apostolorum traditione, but as that which 
is evoked in the soul by the love of Jesus. Everything is 
present in it — contrition, love, the impulse to self-sacrifice, 
the whole manifestation of Christianity in life and act. "The 
life that I now live in the flesh I live by faith, faith in the 
Son of God who loved me and gave Himself up for me" 
(Gal. ii. 20). 

Faith of this scope and intensity is easily misunderstood, 
and it is often set in some kind of contrast to Christian experi- 
ences which are really dependent upon it. This makes it 
desirable to show in more detail how fundamental faith is 
to every experience in which reconciliation is realised in the 
life of sinful men. 

A favourite Pauline description of the Christian life is 
that it is a life "in Christ." The Christian is conceived as one 
who lives and moves and has his being in Christ; to say, 
"I knew a man in Christ" is the same thing as to say, "I knew 
a Christian man." This being in Christ is specially repre- 
sented as being one with Him in the great experiences in 
which the gospel is concentrated, His death and His resurrec- 
tion. It means that the Christian dies with his Lord and 
rises with Him. It finds passionate and classical expres- 
sion in the Epistle to the Galatians (ii. 20) : "I have been 
crucified with Christ, and it is no more I that live, but Christ 
that liveth in me." On the basis of such expressions as these 
the doctrine of a union — sometimes it is called a mystical 
union — of Christ and the Christian has been supported; 

[302] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

and either justification or reconciliation itself, or the life 
of the justified and reconciled, is explained by reference to 
this union. The objective atonement, the finished work of 
Christ on the cross, is viewed with impatience if it is not 
denied, and union with Christ, participation in His death and 
resurrection, is regarded as something far higher and 
finer, and containing far surer guarantees for a new 
and holy life, than mere trust in one who died for our 
sins. 

Such a mode of thought, however, involves a complete 
departure from New Testament lines. Certainly the New 
Testament is full of the idea that the Christian is united to 
Christ, that in a real sense he is one with his Lord. But 
he is one with Him simply and solely through faith. It 
is not indeed faith in the sense of the Council of Trent, faith 
as a creed which has been transmitted by the apostles and 
is taught by the Church for the acceptance of its children; 
such faith unites no one to Christ. It is faith as a passion 
in which the whole being of man is caught up and abandoned 
unconditionally to the love revealed in the Saviour; faith 
to which love is integral, because it is itself a response to 
a love which passes knowledge. But the one thing in the 
universe which evokes such faith — the one thing therefore 
which brings any one into union with Christ in the sense 
of the New Testament — is the love of Christ in which He 
bears our sins in His own body on the tree. What enabled 
Paul to say, "I am crucified with Christ, and it is no more 
I that live but Christ that liveth in me," was his faith in the 
Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself up for him, 
It is not permissible to speak of union with Christ except 
in this atmosphere, and with this intensity of feeling. It 
is true when it is the expression of apostolic passion; when 

[303] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

it is the expression of commonplace orthodox formal piety 
it is not only false but repulsive. 

Faith in Christ who died for us is a power so strong that 
through it we are, so to speak, lost in Him. The feeble 
stream of our life, with all its aimless eddies and wanderings, 
is caught up and carried forward in the mighty stream of 
His eternal life. To say that through faith we die with Him 
and live with Him is to give a vivid and pictorial statement 
of the truth, conditioned by the fact that the death and 
resurrection of Jesus were the great momenta of His recon- 
ciling work as it is exhibited in the gospel. But to die with 
Him and to live with Him are themselves expressions which 
need interpretation. As applied to Jesus they have a his- 
torical, it might even be said a physical sense, in which they 
do not apply to us. We do not, even in virtue of our union 
with Him through faith, die as He died on Calvary, and 
rise into newness of life as He rose from Joseph's grave. 
There may be a continuity between this and our present 
experience in union with Him, but this is not our present 
experience. Our dying with Him, even if we call it, as Paul 
does, our crucifixion with Him, is a present and an ethical 
experience ; it is a dying to sin, a being or rather a becoming 
insensible to its appeals and its power; our living with Him 
is a being alive to God, a new sensibility to His claim upon 
our life. In other words, our union with Christ is not meta- 
physical or mystical, but moral; it is not a basis for a new 
life such as faith could not give, or such as includes a security 
for the new life beyond what faith could bestow ; it is some- 
thing achieved by faith in the very measure in which faith 
makes Christ's attitude to sin and to God its own. It is 
this which gives importance to all that was said in the last 
chapter of the ethical content of the Passion of Jesus. When 

[304] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

we believe in Him, we believe in this. All His thoughts and 
feelings in relation to sin as disclosed in His Passion — all 
His submission to the Father who condemns sin and reacts 
inexorably against it — all His obedience in the spirit of 
sonship — in their measure become ours through faith. This 
itself, and nothing else, is our union to Christ. It is 
something which is accomplished through faith and the 
experiences to which faith leads, not something which has an 
antecedent existence and value of its own on which faith can 
presume. Faith freely and passionately identifies the sinner 
with the sin-bearer, absorbing into itself all His attitude in 
relation to sin: this is the only union with Christ of which 
experience has a word to say. 

Sometimes, however, this subject is approached from the 
other side, and emphasis is laid not on our union with Christ, 
but on His union with us. This is apparently what is in 
view in the doctrine that Christ's humanity is not individual, 
but inclusive, and that therefore all that He did and 
suffered was somehow done and suffered by us. It was 
humanity which in Him made atonement for sin and rose 
again from the dead. His acts and experiences, including 
His Passion and resurrection, were racial acts and experi- 
ences; they were ours in Him; we might almost say they 
were ours as well as His. Even if we allow that this is in- 
telligible, it is difficult to see where its interest or its moral 
power lies. St. Paul does indeed represent Christ as the 
head of a new humanity, as a typical or representative 
person, whose action, like that of Adam, has universal signi- 
ficance, and with whom all men can identify themselves ; but 
the mere existence of Christ does not constitute the new 
humanity. It is only constituted as men in faith freely 
identify themselves with Him. And it ought to be clearly 

[305] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

understood that the power in Christ which wins from men 
the faith in which they freely identify themselves with Him 
does not lie in any metaphysical fact, like His inclusive 
humanity — if such a thing there be — but in the moral fact 
that the Son of God freely and in love identified Himself 
with us. He looked not on His own things only, but on our 
low and lost life. When He was rich, for our sakes He became 
poor. He was not ashamed to call us brethren. He bore 
our sins. It is not His being essentially and metaphysically 
one with us which counts in the gospel — to such words 
most people who need salvation have difficulty in attaching 
any meaning; it is His free self-identification with us as 
condemned and unsheltered men in which His whole power 
to save lies. Christ's union with us is a union in love, and 
our union with Him is a union in the faith evoked by this 
love. As long as we occupy this ground we know that we 
are in the real moral world; we have fact and experience 
to stand upon. That there is anything to be gained by 
venturing beyond it into the regions of mysticism and meta- 
physics is at best problematical. It is certainly no gain, 
but a serious if not a fatal loss, to foster the impression that 
the New Testament can be understood at a lower moral 
temperature than that at which it was written, and to 
extract from the loftiest outbursts of apostolic passion 
nothing better than support for a pretentious and not 
very intelligible idea of Christ's metaphysical relation to 
mankind. 

It hardly needs to be said that no union of Christ with 
men or of men with Christ is contemplated in the New Testa- 
ment which would destroy the personality or individuality 
of the sinner. There are some things which it is hardly 
possible for a man to utter, and the passion which leaps up 

[306] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

to express them may at times overleap itself. When Paul 
exclaimed, "It is no more I that live but Christ liveth in me," 
he was throwing out words at one of these permanently 
inexpressible things, and it is beside the mark to reduce 
them to cold prose and read them as if they had been dictated 
in a psychologist's laboratory; they do not mean that 
Christ or the Spirit of Christ had become the "constituting 
reality" * of Paul himself, so that Paul virtually ceased to 
be, his old personality vanishing, and that of Christ appear- 
ing in its place. Paul never ceased to be ; if he had, he would 
not have been saved in Christ, but lost in God. Whatever 
union with Christ does, it enables a man to become himself, 
the true self with all the individuality for which God created 
Him; when Paul says, "I live no longer, but Christ liveth 
in me," he is not declaring his pure passivity or abnegation 
of striving henceforth, but the completeness with which 
Christ is taking his personality into His service. 

This leads one naturally to speak of another mode in which 
the life of the reconciled is represented in the New Testament 
— that which explains it not as life in union with Christ, 
but as life in the Spirit. Of all New Testament subjects on 
which much has been written, one may venture to think 
the doctrine of the Spirit the most unfortunate. It has 
become popular in circles in which the conditions are want- 
ing for the proper appreciation of the New Testament facts, 
and there are coteries of Christians, not without influence, 
whose very badge is a way of thinking, or at least of speaking, 
about the Spirit, which to many of their fellow Christians 
seems eccentric and unreal. Unquestionably the New Testa- 
ment justifies the amplest attention to the place of the Spirit 
in the life of reconciliation, but it is not so easy to do justice 

1 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 151. 

[307] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

to the New Testament facts as some of those who speak 
most of the Spirit appear to think. 

It will not be disputed that in the New Testament the 
Spirit is only given to believers. By believers is meant, of 
course, believers in Jesus, believers in Christ as the apostolic 
gospel exhibits Him appealing for faith. In spite of the 
creeds, there is no such expression in the New Testament 
as believing in the Holy Ghost. The Spirit is not an object 
of faith like Christ or God, it is an experience which comes 
to people through faith. Whether we judge from the accounts 
in the Book of Acts or in the Epistles of Paul, it was. a vivid 
emotional experience. The figures employed in the story 
of Pentecost — the sound as of a rushing mighty wind, tongues 
like as of fire — are fundamentally true and of permanent 
importance. The Spirit was an experience in which believers 
were the subjects of a divine excitement in which their life 
was raised to a new power. In the Acts of the Apostles 
the manifestations of this excitement specified are speaking 
with tongues and prophecy. Speaking with tongues was 
an unintelligible and almost inarticulate ecstasy of praise, 
a rapture of joy in which believers declared the mighty works 
of God (Acts ii. 1 1), or gave thanks for what He had done 
(l Cor. xiv. 16); prophecy was a more conscious and con- 
trolled utterance, yet one in which the soul of the speaker 
was on fire. There are three ideas mainly which are con- 
nected with the Spirit everywhere, in addition to the general 
idea — that in the Spirit it is God who is acting upon and 
in men. These are the ideas of power, of life, and of joy. 
The first is omnipresent in the New Testament. God 
anointed Jesus of Nazareth with Holy Spirit and power: 
the two are one. Paul preached at Thessalonica in power 
and in the Holy Spirit: again the two are one. Life is not 

[308] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

essentially distinct from power, and it is in the experience 
of the Spirit strengthening them that believers are conscious 
of it as a quickening or life-giving Spirit. Possibly the most 
characteristic of the three terms is joy. The emotional 
excitement which was characteristic of primitive Chris- 
tianity was a glad excitement. It breathes upon us still 
from the early pages of Acts. It is declared in Paul when 
he tells us that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, or 
that the Thessalonians received the gospel in much afflic- 
tion with joy of the Holy Spirit; indeed this combination 
— much affliction and joy of the Spirit — is more than anything 
else the seal of apostolic Christianity. It is as an experience 
of power, life, and joy — an exciting and overwhelming 
experience due to God Himself— that the Spirit can be spoken 
of as the key to the life of reconciliation. 

It has become a commonplace of New Testament theology 
to show how St. Paul modified and developed this primitive 
conception of the Spirit till Spirit was no longer the name 
for unusual or exciting religious experiences, but for the 
principle of all religious experience whatsoever. But Paul 
never lost contact with the primitive conception, nor with 
its essential characteristics. All he has to say about the 
Spirit might be condensed in the striking words of Rom. v. 5 : 
"The Christian hope puts no man to shame, for the love of 
God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit 
given to us." This is what the Holy Spirit does : it fills the 
Christian heart with an exultant assurance of the love of 
God. The man who has such an assurance — the man whose 
heart is full to overflowing with the sense of that love which 
God demonstrated to men when He gave His Son to die for 
sinners — is full of the Holy Ghost. In the words of the 
Old Testament, the joy of the Lord is his strength. It is 

[309] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the inspiration of everything in his Christian life. It is the 
motive and the power of all his service of God and man. 
It enables him to subdue the flesh, to rejoice in tribulation, 
to exult in hope of the glory of God. It is best understood 
by the man who has had experience of a real religious revival 
and who has shared the emotion of the hymn, "I feel like 
singing all the time." Such emotion is to a great extent 
social or contagious, but it only represents more truly in 
that respect the experience of the Spirit in primitive Chris- 
tianity. The Spirit fell as a rule on groups or bodies of men 
united in a common faith or expectation, or subject in common 
to some strong religious impression. They were all filled 
with it, and uplifted accordingly in a new power, life, and 
joy, which they recognised as divine. 

This may appear to some extremely vague, and lacking 
in definitely Christian character. It will be charged with 
ignoring the personality of the Holy Spirit, and reducing 
the Third Person of the Trinity to an emotional disturbance 
of human nature, as likely to delude as to promote sancti- 
fication. Perhaps the best answer to such criticisms is to 
point out that even in the apostolic age the inconveniences 
of the doctrine of the Spirit were already felt, and various 
attempts made to remedy or to guard against them. Sub- 
stantially these attempts came to this: the Spirit had to 
be more precisely connected with Christ, and with His work 
and purposes for men. In itself Spirit is a very vague term. 
The gospels explain morbid phenomena of various kinds, 
intellectual or moral, by describing the subject of them as 
"in an unclean spirit." The mood of sullenness or frenzy or 
despair in which the man lived was due to a power not simply 
himself, and not God either. It was due to a spirit which 
the Spirit of God in Jesus could vanquish. It is quite 

[310] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

clear from l Cor. xii. 1-3, and other passages that there were 
ambiguous "spiritual" phenomena in the Pauline Churches, 
and that the apostle found it necessary to state a criterion 
by which the true could be distinguished from the false. 
Here, apparently, it is a dogmatic criterion: the spirit is 
genuinely Christian if its utterance is one which exalts 
Jesus, calling Him Lord. But in other places Paul seems 
to find it necessary to connect Jesus and the Spirit still more 
closely. Thus, as has often been pointed out, in Rom. viii. 
9-11, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, and Christ Him- 
self are practically indistinguishable. It is all one if we can 
say of people that the Spirit of God dwells in them, or that 
they have the Spirit of Christ, or that Christ is in them. 
All these are ways in which we can describe the life of recon- 
ciliation as it is realised in men. They make it plain that 
the explanation of that life is divine, and they prevent any 
misapprehension about the divine Spirit by frankly identify- 
ing the indwelling of the Spirit in the Christian sense with 
the spiritual indwelling of Christ Himself. But there is no 
justification in this for representing the Spirit as a third 
person in the same sense as God and Christ. Paul never 
knew Christ except as Spirit — except as a being who could 
enter into and tell upon his life as God Himself entered; 
and his whole concern in this passage is not to distinguish 
Christ and the Spirit, but to show that nothing is entitled 
to be recognised as really Spirit among Christians if it is 
distinguishable from Christ and from the divine power with 
which He acts in the souls and in the life of men. 

This brings us back inevitably to Christ Himself, and to 
the faith by which a saving connection is established between 
Christ and the soul. When faith is taken in its full New 
Testament sense — when it is the unreserved and passionate 

[311] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

abandonment of the sinner to the sin-bearing love of God 
in Christ — it is related to the Spirit as immediately as to 
Christ Himself. To be a believer in Christ and to have the 
Spirit are identically the same. No man has the Spirit who 
is not a believer in Christ, and no man who is a believer in 
Christ has not the Spirit. Faith and the Spirit, in short, as 
has been pointed out above, are correlative terms. They 
describe the very same Christian experience from comple- 
mentary points of view, the human and the divine. There 
is no genuine Christian experience of which you cannot say 
at one and the same time that it is the experience of a believer 
and an experience in the Spirit; it is conditioned by faith 
and its causality is divine. But the faith of which we are 
speaking is faith in Christ as He is proclaimed in the gospel, 
and the divine causality is one which operates solely through 
this Christ and the appeal He makes to the sinful soul. The 
doctrine of the Holy Spirit, as an element in the ecclesiastical 
doctrine of the Trinity, goes far beyond this, and far beyond 
anything which the New Testament defines. Accordingly, 
while we may admit that a view like that of Moberly is sub- 
stantially correct in asserting that men are saved through 
the production or reproduction in them of the mind of Christ 
in relation to sin, we can only decline as an incredible arti- 
ficiality his conception of the process by which this pro- 
duction or reproduction is achieved. We can think of no 
presence of the Spirit except the spiritual presence of Christ 
Himself. We can think of no condition which secures this 
presence except the condition of faith in Christ. Nor can 
we, in consistency with the gospel, think of any faith in 
Christ by which this presence is not secured. In experience, 
faith and the Spirit are the same thing; in both alike we are 
reconciled to God and enabled to live the life of reconciliation. 

[312] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

The same truth comes out in another way if we look to 
the moral features of the life of faith. Faith, as has already 
been shown, involves the self-identification of the soul with 
Christ in a passion of trust and love, and through such self- 
identification the mind of Christ in relation to sin is spon- 
taneously produced in the believing sinner. This has been 
described in two different ways. Sometimes it is spoken of 
as repentance, sometimes as regeneration or the new creature. 
Calvin identified the two when he said poenitentiam inter- 
pret or rege?ierationem. But it is interesting to notice the 
different relations which explain the different names of the 
same thing. It is called repentance when we think of it 
from the side of the sinner, and of his responsibility and 
initiative in it; it is called regeneration when we think of 
it from the side of God, as something in which a gracious 
initiative belongs to Him. Both ways of conceiving it are 
equally just, and indeed equally necessary. But what 
invites our attention here is the analogy they present to 
what has just been said of faith and the Spirit. We come 
perpetually, in the relations of God and man, to a point 
at which the same thing has to be described as at once divine 
and human — as present in virtue of a divine causality and 
a human condition, neither of which exists except as calling 
for, or called for by, the other. It is a curious confirmation 
of this, in the case with which we are now dealing, that in the 
synoptic gospels, in which human responsibility is certainly 
emphasised as nowhere else in the New Testament, repentance 
is frequently spoken of, but regeneration never ; whereas in the 
fourth gospel, with its dominantly theological outlook, regen- 
eration is conspicuous, and repentance is never mentioned. 
Nevertheless, they are one thing, and it is a thing unintelligi- 
ble except through God on the one side and faith on the other. 

[313] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

A further complication has been introduced into the life of 
reconciliation by the place which in some Churches is given 
to the sacraments, and especially to baptism as the sacra- 
ment of initiation or of regeneration. The Council of Trent, 
as quoted above, speaks of the sacrament of baptism as the 
instrumental cause of justification; it is by baptism as a 
sacrament, effective ex opere operato, that the sinner is united 
to Christ and at once purged from his sins and initiated into 
the new, supernatural, and divine life. Views akin to this, 
though not perhaps very authoritatively defined, are cer- 
tainly current also in other Churches which affect the Catholic 
character. It is not easy for one who does not accept them 
to be sure that he knows what they mean, but they make it 
desirable that the contrary view should be stated as explicitly 
as possible. 

The basis in the New Testament for the doctrine that 
connects the life of reconciliation with baptism is the passage 
in Rom. vi. 1-11, in which Paul appeals to baptism in his 
argument against the idea that we may continue in sin that 
grace may abound. It is taken for granted that all Christians 
are baptized, and that there is something in baptism quite 
inconsistent with the idea in question. Now what is this 
something? What is it in baptism which precludes the 
idea that the Christian may live on in sin"? Baptism is a 
rite with a meaning, of course, but the meaning may be 
more or less distinctly made out; it is a symbol — every one 
admits this at least, however far he may go beyond it — but 
a symbol which may be more superficially or more pro- 
foundly understood. The most obvious interpretation of it 
is that it is a washing, or if regard is paid to immersion, a 
bath, and that is what we sometimes find in the New Testa- 
ment. When Paul himself was baptized, Ananias said to 

[3h] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

him, "Arise, have thyself baptized, and wash away thy 
sins, calling upon His name" (Acts xxii. 16). So also in 
1 Cor. vi. 11, referring to the same crisis in the spiritual 
history of the Corinthians: "Ye were washed, ye were 
sanctified" — that is, consecrated to God, made His people — 
"ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and 
in the Spirit of our God." But this symbolism of washing 
or cleansing is not the one of which Paul makes use in Romans 
vi. What he speaks of is being baptized into Christ, and 
therefore, by consequence, into His death and resurrection. 
The immersion represents death with Christ, or, to put it 
as strongly and vividly as possible, death and burial with 
Him; the emersion represents resurrection with Christ, rising 
from the dead with Him to walk in newness of life. It is 
because this is what baptism means, and because all Christians 
have been baptized, that to live on deliberately in sin is for 
the Christian an inconceivable, self-contradictory, and impos- 
sible course. 

There are two questions to ask about this argument. The 
first is, How did Paul light upon it"? How did it occur to 
him to ignore the simple idea of baptism as a washing with 
water, and to replace it by this striking and original idea 
of a union with Christ in His death and resurrection, which 
— although, as has already been noticed, the death and 
resurrection were historical or natural events — is supposed 
to carry with it of necessity ethical or spiritual consequences ? 
Reference has been made to the Hellenistic mystery religions 
and their influence on the thought of the Church, but, so far 
as the writer knows, there is no evidence whatever that in 
any of these religions the idea can be found of a "mystical" 
union of the initiate, by a lustral or any other rite, with his 
dying and rising God. Sound or unsound, the idea belongs 

[315] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

to the sixth chapter of Romans alone. It is forcing the 
language of verse 6 — "knowing this, that our old man was 
crucified with Him" — to argue from it, as Lagrange does in 
his commentary on the passage, that this whole conception 
of baptism was familiar to the Romans independently of 
Paul, and was in fact current in the Church and simply 
inherited by him. The whole difficulty of understanding 
the passage has arisen from the fact that baptism has been 
taken in it as if it were a thing in itself, whereas the only 
baptism known to the apostolic Church, and therefore the 
baptism here spoken of, was that of believers solemnly and 
publicly declaring their faith in Christ. The death and the 
resurrection with Christ are not in the rite of baptism, apart 
from faith, and with a view to the experience of them by 
faith; they are in the gospel, to begin with, and in the rite 
only through the faith which accepts the gospel. Essentially 
there is nothing in Paul's gospel but Christ and faith, and 
faith, it cannot be said too often, is the unreserved abandon- 
ment of the sinful soul to Christ, its unreserved identifica- 
tion of itself with Him in trust and love ; when it is unfolded 
with any detail, it is the soul's self -identification with Christ 
in His death and resurrection, the two great events in which 
His saving significance is summed up. It is through faith, 
as that which establishes our fundamental relation to Christ, 
that all this can be read into the rite of baptism, and actually 
is read into it by Paul. Baptism is for him a picture of what 
faith really is. It i£ not baptism as a sacrament ex opere 
operato that involves death and resurrection with Christ, 
and is therefore inconsistent with a continued life in sin; 
it is the baptism of believers who have in faith identified 
themselves with the Lord who died for them and rose again. 
The further question suggested by Romans vi. is one as 

[316] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

to the soundness of the argument itself. Setting aside as 
impossible for our minds the idea that this death and rising 
again with Christ was the supernaturally revealed signifi- 
cance of baptism, and that, therefore, however mysterious or 
incomprehensible it is it must be true, we are compelled to 
ask whether it is logically coherent, and whether it is support- 
ed by appeal to experience. In both respects it has seemed 
to many to leave something to be desired. The death and 
resurrection of Christ have one meaning in the premises and 
another in the conclusion — one meaning in Him, and another 
in application to us. Paul does indeed say that Christ 
died to sin once for all, but there is not a word in the New 
Testament more hard to understand or to explain than this; 
nor is it any easier to understand or to explain, whatever 
be its sense, how a "mystical" union with Him, effected in 
baptism, reproduces His death to sin in us. 1 Similarly Paul 
says that Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of 
the Father, and that we accordingly must walk in newness 
of life. But there is no real connection of thought in this. 
Christ was not more holy after the resurrection than before, 
and there is no more security for a good life in being united 
to Him in one mode of being than in another. As for the 
appeal to experience, it is frankly given up by the apostle 
himself when, at the close of this ingenious but perplexed 
digression, he says to his readers: ''Reckon yourselves dead 
to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus." Apart from this 
self -reckoning, which when real is simply the renewal of 
faith's identification of itself with the Saviour, all this about 
union with the death and resurrection of Christ in baptism 
is meaningless. 

It may occur to some readers that justice is not done in 

1 See pp. 246 f., supra. 

[317] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

this to those passages in the New Testament in which the 
gift of the Spirit is associated with baptism. When Christ 
Himself was baptized, the Spirit descended on Him in the 
form of a dove, and this became the type of Christian bap- 
tism. The forerunner had contrasted baptism with water and 
baptism with the Spirit, but in the Church they were normally 
coincident. "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in 
the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins, and 
ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost" (Acts ii. 38). 
"Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot 
enter into the Kingdom of God" (John iii. 5). "He saved 
us through the laver of regeneration and renewing of the 
Holy Spirit, which He poured out on us richly, through Jesus 
Christ our Saviour" (Titus iii. 5). These passages belong, 
indeed, to the latest in the New Testament, and in the form 
of them there is as much which is due to nascent Catholicism 
as to the experience of the first days, but there is nothing in 
them which is not easily enough understood. The prime neces- 
sity is to remember that the baptism of those days was the bap- 
tism of believers, and that the occasion on which the believer 
made public and solemn confession of his faith in baptism, 
calling upon the name of the Lord, and renouncing the life 
in which he had hitherto lived, was normally an occasion of 
high and serious emotion — an occasion of precisely such 
experiences as were then explained by reference to the Spirit. 
Where baptism took place with no such experience, it was 
recognised that something which ought to have been there 
was absent (Acts viii. 14 f.; xix. 2 ff.), and special efforts 
were made to remedy the defect. This is what we see in 
Acts viii. 14 f. and Acts xix. 2 ff. In spite of these two 
passages, however, in which we are told how Peter and 
John at Samaria, and Paul at Ephesus, obtained the Spirit 

[318] 






RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

by prayer and laying on of hands for baptized persons who 
had not received the gift, there is no suggestion anywhere 
in the New Testament that it was not normally connected 
with faith and baptism, but only came when these were con- 
firmed by the imposition of apostolic (or episcopal) hands. 
The cases in question are both marked as abnormal, and 
unusual efforts were made to secure in them the normal 
accompaniments of the rite. In both cases, too, these efforts 
were successful. There was an outburst of the emotion 
which was regarded in those days as the work of the Spirit. 
"They spake with tongues and prophesied." The general 
practice of infant baptism has made it difficult to apply 
this circle of ideas in the modern Church. When believing men, 
confessing their faith in baptism, were said in the apostolic 
age to receive the Holy Spirit, it meant that they had religious 
experiences of a powerful and moving character, due to Jesus 
and to their faith in Him, and to the whole circumstances 
in which it was declared. But no part of this has any appli- 
cation whatever to the baptism of unconscious infants, and 
to speak of their regeneration by the Spirit in baptism is 
to use language which has no relation to the New Testament 
facts, language which neither has nor ever can have any intel- 
ligible meaning. There may be justification for infant bap- 
tism, but not along this line. The love of God which is de- 
clared in the name in which baptism is administered is the one 
power by which a human soul is ever raised from death to 
life, and in that sense the grace of baptism — to use an ambigu- 
ous and misleading expression — is the grace which saves; 
but to say that baptism ex opere operato regenerates, or 
confers the gift of the Spirit, or unites us to Christ, or implants 
in us the seed of the new life, is not to help but only to 
bewilder or rather to extinguish the mind. Baptism enters 

£319] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

into the process of salvation only when it coincides with the 
act of faith in which the soul, under solemn and moving 
conditions, consciously and irrevocably commits itself to 
Christ, identifying itself, in spiritual passion, with Him who 
died for it and rose again. 

The same considerations would apply to the Lord's Supper, 
on which also stress has been laid as the support of the new 
reconciled life. It is obvious from the tenth chapter of First 
Corinthians, that at a very early date superstitious ideas 
began to be associated with this rite as well as with baptism. 
There were people in the Church at Corinth who thought 
that to be baptized and to eat and drink at the Lord's table 
gave them a moral security which enabled them to ignore 
or despise temptation, and to relax self-discipline; they 
were secure of a blessed immortality no matter what they 
did or what happened to them in this world. Such ideas 
were undoubtedly common in connection with the rites of 
the pagan mystery religions, and the apostle sets himself 
vigorously to purge out this immoral leaven from the Christian 
society. He bids the Corinthians look at the Old Testa- 
ment history and learn its lessons. The Israelites had 
sacraments as well as we; they were baptized into Moses 
in the cloud and the sea ; they had spiritual — or supernatural 
— food and drink, the manna from heaven and the water 
from the rock; nay, it was the very same food and drink 
which we have at the Lord's table, for the spiritual rock 
which followed him was the Christ. But their privileges 
did not guarantee their moral security; their carcasses fell 
in the wilderness ; they never saw the promised land. When 
we speak of eating the flesh of the Son of Man and drinking 
His blood, we are bound to remember that the words can 
only be understood in the moral and spiritual world. There 

[32o] 






RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

is no intelligible meaning in saying that Christ is present 
in the bread and wine, or in, with, and under the bread and 
wine, or, what is the poorest of all evasions of intelligence, 
in "sacramental union" with the bread and wine; the pres- 
ence of Christ neither has nor can have any metaphysical 
relation whatever to the sacramental elements. Christ is 
present when the supper is celebrated, and present in the 
sense of these elements; He is present to be our meat and 
drink; He is present as the Lord whose body was broken 
and whose blood was shed for us, as He who once gave Him- 
self for us, and perpetually offers Himself to us; He is per- 
sonally present that in faith we may open our being to 
Him' and receive Him in that significance in which He is 
declared by the symbols. But He is always present so; 
always, and not only in the celebration of the sacraments. 
The sacraments are pictures which enable us to see better 
what Christ is to sinners; as Robert Bruce put it, we get a 
better grip of Him in the sacrament; but Christ is a person, 
and though we see better in the sacrament what kind of 
person He is, the personal relation to Him in which salvation 
consists can never depend on what is sometimes spoken of 
as sacramental grace. No sacrament can do anything but 
interpret the grace which is in Him. And this grace is not 
a thing, which can be absorbed as food or medicine is 
absorbed; it is the redeeming love of Christ; it is His atti- 
tude of mercy, as the sin-bearing Saviour, to men lost in 
sin; and it tells on us simply and solely as it wins from 
us the unreserved response of faith. When we celebrate 
the Lord's supper we declare that we live by faith in the 
Son of God, who loved us and died for us, but we do not 
mean that the celebration is the act or the process in which 
the life of faith is realised, or in which it has its essential 

[321] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

support, or even its supreme manifestation. Still less do 
we mean that the bread and the wine, consecrated or un- 
consecrated — expressions totally destitute of New Testa- 
ment authority — have anything to do with it. Christ and 
faith are the supreme realities in Christianity, the supreme 
categories under which everything Christian, not excepting 
the sacraments, has to be reduced; and however the believ- 
ing soul may be helped in its relation to Christ by rites like 
baptism and the supper, it is the negation not only of Christian 
experience, but of human intelligence, to say that the new 
life is essentially or vitally related to the water, or to the 
bread and the wine. 

The primacy of Christ and faith must determine also our 
judgment as to the place of the Church in the life of recon- 
ciliation. Of all terms in the vocabulary of religion, "Church" 
is probably the most ambiguous, and it is therefore very 
difficult to tell what is meant by it in any given case. There 
is a sense, no doubt, in which the life of reconciliation can 
only be lived in the Church. The faith which unites men 
to Christ is a common faith, and in uniting them to Him it 
unites them to one another. It constitutes them members 
of a society, of a new humanity living with a new life, the 
life of faith in Jesus. It is as a member of this new humanity 
that the believer in Jesus realises his new life. But no cor- 
poration or aggregate of corporations on earth — whether it 
be the Church of Rome, or the Greek Church, or the Church 
of England, or all of them together — can take the place of 
the new humanity, and say that the life of reconciliation 
can only be lived within its fellowship, and indeed can only 
be produced by a sacramental initiation into it as the body 
of Christ. No one who knows the meaning of Christ and 
of faith can ever assent to any such doctrine. On the other 

[322] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

hand, while asserting in principle the primacy of Christ and 
of faith, and the dependence of the Church, for its very exist- 
ence, upon these as the final realities in Christianity, it can 
be frankly admitted that in Christian as in all history the 
society is of immense consequence to the individual. It 
was individual believers in Christ who first constituted the 
Church, but the historical Church is prior to the individual 
believer to-day. In most cases he has been brought up 
in it, and has known instinctively, from the very beginning, 
what the Christian attitude of the soul to Christ is; in other 
words, he has known what faith is. He has had the benefit 
of an atmosphere. Faith is the faith of the society in which 
he has been born and bred; it is social faith, and he has 
been unconsciously impregnated with it. But it is a quite 
misleading way to put this truth if we say that it is the 
Church which is the guardian of grace, or the Spirit-filled 
body of Christ, or the object of justification, and that it is 
only through membership in the Church that grace, or the 
Spirit, or justification, or reconciliation, can be assured to 
the individual. In history all things are historically mediated, 
and the debt of any given believer to-day to the new humanity 
which has been growing through nineteen centuries is im- 
measurable; but he does not owe to it — and still less to any 
corporation in which some part of it has found self-expres- 
sion — his definitive relation to God as a sinner reconciled, 
and living the life of reconciliation. This he owes to Christ 
alone, and to faith in Him; and the supremacy of Christ 
and faith gives him, as a member of the new humanity, the 
freedom of a final responsibility to Christ. He is not and 
dare not be the slave of men (l Cor. vii. 23), even though 
the men who claim his subjection may call themselves the 
Church. He must give account of himself to God, and no 

[323] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

definitions of doctrine, no claims of orders, no clerical con- 
stitution, no judgments passed by other men's consciences, 
are ipso facto valid for him. He lives the common life of 
Christians, but he is free to react against any manifestation 
of it, intellectual or moral, in the strength of that faith in 
Christ which for him is the first and last of realities. He 
judges all things through it— not excepting the creeds and 
constitutions which men in the course of history have framed 
for the Church; he judges all things, and does not submit 
to be judged by any (l Cor. ii. 15). 

Assuming, then, that the life of reconciliation is simply 
the life of faith in Christ, and that faith in Christ is what 
we have maintained it to be — the passionate identification 
of the sinner with Him in trust and love, his self-abandon- 
ment to the sin-bearing love of God revealed in Christ — in 
what way will the life of reconciliation manifest itself in men? 

In the first place, it will appear as reconciliation to the 
mind of God about sin, as that has been declared in Christ, 
and especially in His cross and passion. The tendency in 
human nature to excuse sin, to put forward pleas in extenua- 
tion and defence, to provide in the constitution or education 
or environment of the sinner explanations which neutralise 
his guilt, is instinctive and almost ineradicable. Few sayings 
are more popular with the morally feeble, than that to under- 
stand everything is to pardon everything. To be recon- 
ciled to God through faith in Christ, who died bearing our 
sins, is death to this tendency. It means that we enter 
into the mind of Christ in relation to sin, that we see it in 
its truth as He saw it, that we sorrow over it as He sorrowed, 
that we repel it henceforth as He repelled it; all of which 
is part at least of what is meant by repentance. There is 
no salvation except in and through the truth, and to take 

[324] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

our sin as what it truly is — as what in the Passion of Jesus 
it has been revealed really to be — is to enter into the truth 
through which salvation is realised. Repentance in this sense 
is not a condition preliminary to salvation; it is part of the 
experience of being saved. It is not something which we 
produce out of our own resources, and bring to God, in the 
assurance that now of course He will forgive us; it is some- 
thing which is only produced in us by the sense that there 
is already forgiveness with Him ; it is a saving grace begotten 
in our hearts by that Passion of love in which Jesus made 
our sins His own. It is not a substitute for the atonement, 
or something which makes it unnecessary; it is the fruit 
of the atonement, and of nothing else. 

Perhaps in evangelical theology the scope of repentance 
has been in one respect unduly narrowed. There has been 
a quite proper emphasis on the absolute removal of condemna- 
tion, on the joyful assurance of God's love, on the certainty 
of a consummation where sin will leave no trace of itself 
except in the doxologies which celebrate complete redemp- 
tion from it. But earth is not heaven, and the acceptance 
of God's verdict upon sin, even while He forgives it, is more 
painful than has sometimes been allowed. It involves 
what is called in the book of Leviticus (xxvi. 41) "accepting 
the punishment of our iniquities." The divine reaction 
against sin does not cease with faith. It goes on in the 
constitution and course of nature, and to be reconciled to 
God in Christ means that we acknowledge the justice of 
God in it, and submit to His holy will as expressed in this 
reaction without resentment, bitterness, querulousness, or 
discontent. When we have sinned, and especially if we have 
sinned habitually, the reaction will be felt inevitably, pain- 
fully — and indispensably. It is a discipline which even the 

[325] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

sinner, who now identifies himself with Christ by faith, cannot 
do without. But as part of the treatment of a reconciled 
sinner by the God to whom he is reconciled- — in other words, 
as part of the treatment of a child by the Father — discipline 
is the proper name for it. It is indeed retributive, or it would 
have no disciplinary value. But the sternness in it is that 
of love; it is a severity of God which is not distinct from, 
but an element in, His goodness. To submit to it without 
repining is part of the life of reconciliation as that life is 
inspired and sustained by self-identification with Jesus in 
faith. For He lived under the same inexorable moral order 
as we, and, though He knew not sin, He bore without mur- 
muring the whole conditions of our human lot in which the 
divine reaction against sin speaks perpetually to a sensitive 
conscience. 

But there is another and more positive side to the life of 
reconciliation. The man who is reconciled to God through 
Christ and His Passion is reconciled to love as the law of 
life. God is love, and there is no reconciliation to Him which 
does not involve the acceptance of love as the law of our 
own conduct as it is the law of His. As John puts it, Christ 
laid down His life for us, "and we ought to lay down our 
lives for the brethren" (l John iii. 16). Many have fought 
shy of this saying, and of what corresponds to it in Paul: 
"I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that 
which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for 
His body's sake, which is the Church" (Col. L 24). Perhaps 
the motive for this was good. Men were unwilling to intrude, 
as it were, upon the sphere of Christ, to say anything which 
seemed to question the solitariness or the completeness of 
His work of reconciliation. But the apostles do not seem 
to have been apprehensive on this score. For them the 

[326] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

solitariness and completeness of Christ's work are beyond 
question. He, says John, is the propitiation for the whole 
world, "In Him," says Paul, "it pleased the Father that all 
fulness should dwell, and through Him to reconcile all things 
to Himself, having made peace by the blood of His cross, 
whether they be things on earth or things in the heavens." 
They are careful to make it plain that neither in earth nor 
heaven — that is, nowhere in the universe — is there such a 
thing as reconciliation that is not due to Him. But without 
ascribing the work of reconciliation to men, any more than 
they would have ascribed sin to Christ, they perceive that 
reconciliation to God through Christ means that the law 
and the spirit of Christ's life become the law and the spirit 
of life in those who are reconciled. By faith in Him we are 
really united to Him, not metaphysically but in the passion 
of love and trust. He brings us into an ethical fellowship 
with Himself, in which the inspiration of His life becomes the 
inspiration of ours; the love which moved and controlled 
Him moves and controls us also. When this is not realised, 
the most dreadful of all dangers overhangs the soul. It 
thinks of itself as reconciled to God, but in truth it is keeping 
God out of its life; for God is love. Instead of being recon- 
ciled to God it is being reconciled to its sin. It is acqui- 
escing in a life remote from the life of God. We do not need 
to be afraid that the love we learn from Christ and exercise 
in union with Him will invade His prerogative or prompt 
us to think that we too are making atonement either for 
our own sins or for the sins of others. But if we have not 
learned from Him to look not on our own things only, but 
on the things of others also — to bear each other's burdens, 
even the burden of each other's sins, so as to fulfil His law 
— if we are not willing to do and to suffer for the good of 

[327] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

others as He did and suffered for the good of all — then we 
must ask ourselves what we mean, or whether we mean 
anything, when we speak of being reconciled to God through 
Him. Are we really reconciled when we stand outside of 
that love which is His life*? Does not reconciliation to 
God imply acceptance of love as the law of life*? Does it 
not mean that we acknowledge the obligation to lay down 
our lives for the brethren, and to fill up what is lacking in 
the measure of toil and suffering through which alone the 
kingdom of God can be established on earth*? The love 
of God can only redeem those whom it inspires; to be in- 
spired by it is to have the experience of redemption and 
reconciliation. If we question this, is it not as much as to 
say that we claim to be reconciled to God while we are 
alienated from the life of God through an ignorance that is 
in us owing to the hardening of our hearts? This would be 
the most melancholy of all perversions of the gospel — the 
turning against itself of the very power from which redemp- 
tion and reconciliation proceed. Salvation does not mean 
that we are exempted from living Christ's life ; it means that 
we are enabled to share in that life, to know the fellowship 
of His sufferings, even to be conformed to His death. 

Acceptance of the mind of God with regard to sin, as 
something which wounds His holy love, to which He is finally 
and inexorably opposed — in other words, repentance and 
submission to all the divine reaction against evil; acceptance 
of love as the divine law of life — in other words, self-renunci- 
ation and sacrifice for the good of others : these are the main 
characteristics of the life of reconciliation as a life in which 
the soul identifies itself with Christ through faith. Each 
of them may grow continuously in depth and intensity. 
Repentance is not the act of an instant, in which the sinner 

[328] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

passes from death to life, it is the habit of a lifetime, in which 
he assimilates ever more perfectly the mind of Christ in 
relation to sin — his sorrow, his confession of God's righteous- 
ness in judging it as He does, his unreserved submission to 
everything in which God's reaction against it comes home 
to him. Similarly the acceptance of love as the law of 
life grows perpetually more complete and profound. Under 
the inspiration of Jesus the reconciled soul sees opportunities 
for self-denial, calls for sacrifice, appeals for love, to which 
it would once have been insensible, or to which it would 
have been too selfish or too cowardly to respond. And it is 
in responding without reserve to such appeals, and entering 
without reserve into the mind of Christ in relation to sin, 
that the life of reconciliation to God is realised in sinners 
through faith in Christ. 

One thing further follows from this. The life of recon- 
ciliation is a life which itself exercises a reconciling power. 
It is the ultimate witness to that in God which overcomes all 
that separates man from himself and men from each other. 
Hence it is indispensable to all who work for peace and 
good will among men. Not only the alienation of men from 
God, but their alienation from one another — the estrangement 
of classes within the same society, the estrangement of nations 
and races within the great family of humanity — yield in 
the last resort to love alone. Impartial justice, arbitrating 
from without, can do little for them. But a spirit delivered 
from pride and made truly humble by repentance, a spirit 
purged from selfishness and able in the power of Christ's 
love to see its neighbour's interest as its own, will prove 
victorious alike in the class rivalries of capital and labour, 
and in the international rivalries that are now devastating 
the world. It is in its all-reconciling power that Paul sees 

[329] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

most clearly the absoluteness and finality of the Christian 
religion. Where all the differences have been transcended 
which cause painful tension among men, where there is 
neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, bond nor free, 
there the perfect revelation of God has been made. But 
these differences are transcended only as men find themselves 
in spite of them all one in Christ, and reconciled to God 
through Him. It is in this central oneness that the power lies 
hidden which will subdue all the differences to itself. The 
evangelist is the only pacificator whose specific goes to the root 
of the matter, and it is in Christ only, the one Reconciler of 
God and man, that it has pleased the Father to gather to- 
gether all things in one. 

The centrality and absoluteness of the reconciliation 
achieved by Christ and realised in man through faith make 
it in the New Testament the basis of far-reaching inferences 
of every kind. Whenever Paul speaks of God as having recoi\ - 
ciled us to Himself, he can argue from this to any conclu- 
sion as from the greater to the less. It is on this he bases 
his assurance of God's ever present good will through all the 
chance and change of mortal life. "He that spared not His 
own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not 
also with Him freely give us all things'?" "All things are 
yours . . . the world, or life, or death." "We know that 
to them that love God all things work together for good." 
Who know this? Christians know it who have been recon- 
ciled to God by the death of His Son, and who know that 
the last reality in the world is the love which has borne their 
sins and will not suffer anything to frustrate its gracious 
purpose. The Christian faith in providence is an immediate 
inference from the Christian experience of redemption, and 
it is an inference as vast and unqualified as the redeeming 

. [330] 



RECONCILIATION AS REALISED IN HUMAN LIFE 

love on which it rests. "Who shall separate us from the 
love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, 
or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in 
all these things we are more than conquerors through Him 
who loved us." 

In Paul, in particular, this inference reaches out into the 
unseen and sustains the hope of immortality. Probably we 
underrate, as a rule, the immense place of this hope through- 
out the New Testament, and especially in Paul. It is true 
that to understand him we must begin at the centre, with 
the sinner's reconciliation to God through the sin-bearing 
love of Christ, but we should only make a beginning of under- 
standing him if this experience had not in our minds the 
inspiring power which it had in his. For him, sin and death 
were one, and the victory over sin was a victory over death 
also. There is no more comprehensive and concentrated 
utterance of his whole Christian convictions than "We have 
worn the image of the earthy, and we shall wear the image 
of the heavenly"; that is, we have lived as Adam did in a 
body burdened with sin, dishonour, and mortality; and we 
shall live as Christ lives, in a spiritual body radiant with 
holiness and with life, over which death has no more domin- 
ion. There are various more or less specific ways in which this 
connection of truths appears in the apostle's mind. Some- 
times it is Christ in us who is the hope of glory, sometimes 
the Spirit which is the earnest of our inheritance, sometimes 
God Himself who raises the dead, who is the object of our 
hope. But always, at bottom, it is redeeming and recon- 
ciling love, apprehended by faith — that is, in spiritual experi- 
ence — which sustains this outlook into the future. And 
in this the Old Testament and the New are at one. In the 
sublimest words of the Psalter, immortality is involved in 

[330 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 

the experience of God's gracious and faithful providence 
on earth. "Nevertheless, I am continually with Thee; Thou 
hast holden my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy 
counsel, and afterwards receive me to glory." In the sublimest 
words of the apostle it is made to rest on the specifically 
Christian knowledge of God, but the soul's attitude is the 
same, and so is the inspiration out of which it speaks. "I 
am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor 
principalities, nor powers, nor th ngs present, nor things to 
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be 
able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ 
Jesus our Lord." 

The Christian's faith in reconciliation does not find its 
full expression till it finds it here. 



[332] 



INDEX 



(l) SUBJECTS AND AUTHORS 



Abalard, 78-82. 

Adam, the sin of, 43, 201, 210 f. 

dywvla, 274. 

American Puritanism, 95 f. 

Anselm, 28; merits and defects of 
his theory, 64-79; an d Luther, 92; 
on fallen angels, 230. 

dirddeia, 4-5. 

Aquinas, on the atonement, 84 f. 

dpxvyds, 249 f. 

Articles of faith, 92, 109. 

Assurance, place of religious, 284, 

, 293 f. 

dr&pal-la, 4-5. 

Athanasius, on incarnation and 
atonement, 36 f., 44; on Christ's 
victory over death, 244. 

Atonement, need for an objective, 
30. 33, 90, 108 f., 235 f., 239, 260; 
extent of, 67, 84, 119; and the in- 
carnation, 181 f., 240, 268 f.; sub- 
jective theories of, 80-81, 260. 

Attributes, the divine, 104. 

Augsburg, the Confession of, on the 
satisfaction of Christ, 92-93, 108. 

Augustine, 44; on Christ's salvation, 
51 f. ; on sin, 196-198. 

Authority of Bible, 122. 

Baptism, 91, 216 f., 314 f. 

Baur, F. C, 28, 79, 81. 

Beatitudes, the, 11 f. 

Bernard of Clairvaux, 78, 165. 

Bruce, Robert, quoted, 321. 

Bushnell, Horace, on vicariousness, 

118, 255 f.; on the power of Christ, 

250. 

Calvin, on the descensus ad inferos, 
49, 263 ; on Christ's intercession, 
96; on the grace of God, 100 f.; 



on the sufferings of Christ, 263; 
on regeneration, 313. 

Chalmers quoted, 106, 180, 297. 

Christ, essential to reconciliation, 
8 f. ; God's gift, 30-31, 102-103; 
His satisfaction for sin, 49 f. ; His 
sacrifice, 55 f. ; an illustration of 
God's grace, 63, 74, 81, 102; 
death of, 75 f., 277 f. ; His work 
determined by sin, 235 f., 273; 
bearing our sins, 253 f. ; union with, 
304 f. 

Church (the), place of, in reconcilia- 
tion, 47 f., 51, 58 f., 88 f., 116, 
322 f. 

Conscience, a bad, 189 f., 204 f., 214 f. 

Consequences, moral, 145 f. : of sin, 
24 f., 224 f. 

Cost of reconciliation, 21-22, 32 f., 
102-103, 133, 135. 

"Covenant blood," 140-141. 

Cremer, 76. 

Cross of Jesus, the, 268 f. 

Cyprian, 47. 

Damnosa haereditas, 216 f. 

Death, religious problem of, 39 f., 

244; the experience of, 211 f., 

229, 276, 278; in relation to sin, 

156 f., 209 f., 229 f., 244 f., 275 f. ; 

significance for Jesus Christ, 40 f., 

75, 269 f., 273 f., 280. 
Declaratory Act, the, 199. 
Deissmann on VKacr-fipiov, 153 f. ; on 

irlffTis 'I7j<ro0 XpiffTcv, 155. 
Deliverance from sin, man's yearning 

for, 218 f. 
Depravity, human, 199. 
Devil, redemption from the, 31 f., 

83 f. ; salvation of the, 83. 
5iKaiQ<r6pTi Geov, 142 f., 151. 



[333] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 



Dogma of reconciliation, no, 27 f. 
Doxologies of New Testament, 133, 

283. 
Du Bose, 245-246. 
Duns Scotus, 90. 

Eastern Church, characteristics of 

its theology, 33 f., 44, 52, 244, 

274. 
Edwards, Jonathan, quoted, 118. 
Erskine of Linlathen, quoted, 

145. 
Evolution in relation to sin, 73 f., 

196 f., 210. 
Example, Christ as our, 245 f. 
Experience and reconciliation, 7 f., 

24-25, 199 f. ; and doctrine, 43, 

109 f., 115 f., 148. 

Faith, in theology of Athanasius, 
43; in the New Testament, 284- 
285, 287 f., 303 f., 316; in Pauline 
theology, 162 f., 287 f . ; in Refor- 
mation preaching, 91, 92, 294 f. ; in 
Roman Catholic theology, 297 f. ; 
evoked by Christ, 304 f.; moral 
features of, 313 f. ; and love, 164, 
295, 301 ; and penitence, 284-285 ; 
and the Spirit, 311 f. 

Fides informis, 164. 

Flesh, New Testament doctrine of, 

147 & 

"Forensic" justification, 290 f. 

Forgiveness and reconciliation, 6; 
free and divine, 15-16, 97 f., 
102 f., 132; in Jesus, 103; not 
"a fiction," 137 f., 291 ; human, 
133 f. ; New Testament doctrine 
of, 284 f., 287 f. ; regenerating 
power of, 6, 137 f . ; limits of, 
218 f. 

Future, religious significance of the, 
168 f. 

Germanic Law, 70 f., 76. 

God, Grotius' idea of, 11 1 f. ; relation 
to man, 187 f. ; reconciled to man, 
100, 236 f. ; in what sense He hates 
sin, 60 f., 215; His mercy, 22; 
His honour, 67 f., 74; His omni- 
potence, 84-85. 

Goethe, on unity of man and nature, 
3 f. ; on sense of evil, 114 f. 

Goodness of Jesus, the, 252 f. 

Gospels, are there two in the New | 



Testament? 126 f.; are there two 
in Paul? 165 f. 

Gottschick, 54 f. 

Grace, in early Christian theology, 
45 f., 52 f. ; in the mediaeval 
Church, 74, 91 f. ; meaning of, 261, 
301; in the sacraments, 321; Christ 
an illustration of, 63 f., 74, 81, 102; 
in relation to merits of Christ, 
97 f. 

Greek Fathers, the {see Eastern 
Church), speculative note in, 34, 
35, 42 f. ; on Christ's victory over 
death, 274 f. 

Gregory of Nyssa, 32. 

Grotius, his criticisms of Socinianism, 
no f. ; quoted, 30, 131. 

Halyburton, quoted, 168. 

Harnack, on the two gospels in the 

New Testament, 126 f. 
Hatred, the divine, 60 f., 215. 
Haupt, 146. 
Hebrews, theology of epistle to the, 

172-174. 
Hegel, quoted, 168. 
Historical Christ, the, 9, 129 f. 
Hoffding, quoted, 207. 
Holtzmann, 160, 246. 
Honour, the divine, 67 f., 74. 
Hooker, quoted, 106. 
Hope, in Christianity, 169. 
Hopkins, quoted, 95-96, 108. 
Humility, Christ's, 61 f., 84. 
Hypostatic union, the, 240 f. 

Identification of Christ with sinful 
men, 58, 118 f., 173, 249 f., 263, 
274, 306. 

Ignorance, sins of, 222 f. 

IXacr/JLOS, 175-176, 234. 

Waffr-fjpiov, 153 f., 157-159, 175, 

234. 
Immortality, 226, 331 f. 
Imputation, doctrine of, 119, 178. 
Incarnation, the, in the theology of 

Athanasius, 36 f . ; motives of, 59 f. ; 

to be interpreted through the 

atonement, 65 f., 71, 181 f., 240 f.; 

real meaning of, 183-184, 242. 
"In Christ," meaning of, 302 f. 
Infants, baptism of, 216 f., 321; 

salvation of, 217 f. 
Irenaeus, 34-35. 



[334] 



INDEX 



Jesus {see under Christ), reconciling 
power of, 9-10, 12 f. ; decisive 
nature of His death, 17 i., 75, 
271 f. ; significance of His life, 38, 
94 f., 242 f., 255 f. ; obedience of, 
94 f.; humility of, 61 f. ; suffer- 
ings of, 112; personality of, 119 f. ; 
receiving sinners, 131 f., 252 f . ; 
dying to sin, 246 f. ; an example 
of faith, 127, 245 f. ; sinlessness 
of, 243 f. ; baptism of, 251 f. ; 
bearing sins, 254 f., 274 f. ; sym- 
pathy of, 17, 258 f. ; our indebted- 
ness to, 99, 163, 283 ; unique 
position of, 280-281 ; surrender to, 
163, 291, 295 f. 

Job, the book of, 213. 

Johannine theology, the, 174 f., 
272. 

John of Damascus, 32. 

Joy of reconciliation, the, 285, 293, 
295, 309 f. 

Judgment according to works, 170. 

Justice, never opposed to mercy, 22, 
103 f., 231 f. 

Justification, and sanctification, 105 
f., 288 f., 297; "forensic," 290 f. 

Kant, on need for reconciliation, 

3 f. ; on radical evil, 113 f. 
KaraWayfi, 239. 
Kingdom of God, 113, 138 f., 230. 

Lagrange, 316. 

Latin theology, 44, 51 f. 

Law, Pauline doctrine of the, 166 f. ; 
in relations of God and man, 
187 f. ; the law of God, 223. 

Life, reconciliation to conditions of, 
1 f., 11, 171; the new, 104 f., 

3i3 *• 

Lightfoot quoted, 152, 158, 

Lofthouse quoted, 287. 

Logos, theology of the, 33 f. 

Loofs, 78, 92. 

Love, God's, the supreme reality, 
20; revealed by death of Christ, 
18, 60 f., 79; undervalued in 
Anselm, 75; ethical seriousness 
of, 228, 231 f., 234 f. ; the origin 
and essence of reconciliation, 59 f., 
90 f., 255 f., 295; the inspiration 
and law for human life, 326 f. 

Lucretius quoted, 2. 

Luther, 49, 92 f. ; on the merits of 



Christ, 96; on the sufferings of 
Christ, 263 ; on faith, 291, 294. 
Lyman, quoted, 26. 

McLeod Campbell, 51, 90, 239; on 
Christ acknowledging God's con- 
demnation of sin, 117 f. ; on the 
love of Christ, 255 f . ; on the death 
of Christ, 266 f. 

Mediator, Christ as, 54 f., 60. 

Melanchthon, on sacraments, 91 ; on 
the divine satisfaction, 94. 

Menken, 245-246. 

Mercy, not opposed to justice, 22, 
103 f., 231. 

Merit (s) of Christ, meaning of, 23- 
24, 96; in Anselm, 77 f. ; in 
Aquinas, 86-87. 

Moberly, R. C, criticisms of, 44, 51, 
284-285, 307. 

Moffatt, 131, 249. 

Montaigne, 5. 

Mysticism, in Osiander, 106; 
Schleiermacher and Ritschl, 116; 
Johannine, 176; Pauline, 302 f. 

Nature, and the spiritual world, 3, 

201 f., 225 f. 
Necessity, and freedom in God, 7, 

84-85, 230 f. 
Neoplatonism, in Augustine, 51-53, 

60. 
Newman, on justification, 107-108. 

Obedience, of Jesus, 95 f., 233. 

Omnipotence of God, 84-85. 

dpyty Oeov, 149. 

Origen, 34-35. 

Orthodoxy, danger of, 105, 109 f., 

184, 263. 
Osiander, 106-107. 
Owen, John, quoted, 49. 

Parables, of Jesus: the prodigal 
son, 13, 132, 135, 170; the two 
debtors, 13, 132; the unmerciful 
servant, 136; the rock and the sand, 
170. 

Trdpwij, 158. 

Passion of Jesus, the, 85 f., 129 f.; 
misinterpretations of, 262 f. 

Paul, on the Old Testament, 124 f.; 
a preacher of reconciliation, 141 f. ; 
permanent message of, 179 f.; on 
the flesh, 147 f. ; on the law, 166 f. ; 



[335] 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 



on justification, 293 f.; on union 
with Christ, 302 f. ; on the Spirit, 
309 f. ; on baptism, 314 f. ; on the 
Lord's Supper, 320 f. ; on immor- 
tality, 331 f. 

Peace, human instinct for harmony 
and, 1, 3-4; Jesus our, 10, 25. 

Pelagianism, 114, 196. 

Penal character of Christ's sufferings, 
48 f., no f. ; of human suffering, 
214 f. 

Penitence, mediaeval idea of, 46 f., 
89 f.; and faith, 284-285. 

Peter the Lombard, 82 f., 90, 102. 

ir Urns 'I^troO Xpurrov, 155. 

Predestination, 64, 108. 

Propitiation, New Testament doctrine 
of, 152 f. ; essential, 161 f., 176, 236. 

Providence, belief in, 179, 330-333. 

Punishment, and satisfaction, 48, 
87 f.; endured by Christ, 57 f., 
101 f., 262 f. ; in relation to sin, 
69 f., 203 f. ; object of, 112; ethics 
of, 207 f. ; and retribution, 209; hu- 
man and divine, 209 f. ; not con- 
fined to conscience, 214 f., 276; and 
chastisement, 227, 325-326; of inno- 
cent, 2. 



Ransom, religious category of, 31 f. 

Reconciliation, scope of, 2 f., 12, 171, 
177 f. ; not confined to sphere of 
conscience, 212 f. ; between man 
and man, 176 f., 329 f. ; determined 
by fact of sin, 12 f. ; absoluteness of, 
21, 168 f. ; cost of, 21-22, 102-103, 
135 f. ; a moral process, 23 f., 56; 
the work of Jesus, 129 f., 261 ; in 
relation to experience, 24 f., 293 f. ; 
subjective and objective, 109 ; the 
preparation for, 135 f . ; man's need 
of, 187 f. ; effected by God's love, 
82, 218; alleged contradiction in, 
109 f. ; how far a divine necessity, 
230 f, 236 f. ; power of, 287 f. ; ob- 
ligations of, 326 f. ; main features 
of, 328. 

Redemptiones, in mediaeval theology, 
50 f., 76. 

Reformation, the sixteenth century, 
an epoch in theology, 28 ; attitude 
towards Christ, 91 f., 119 f.; re- 
ligious vitality of, 294 f. 

Regeneration, 313 f. 



Repentance, evoked by Jesus, 16, 254; 
characterised, 313, 324 f. 

Responsibility, individual and cor- 
porate, 191 f., 323 f. 

Retribution, essential to punishment, 
208 f., 326. 

Righteousness, the divine, in Osian- 
der's theology, 106 f. ; in Paulinism, 
142 f. 

Ritschl, on reconciliation, 2, 6-7, 28, 
115 f.; his definition of love, 61; 
on the presupposition of reconcilia- 
tion, 186; on sins of ignorance, 
222; on the Kingdom of God, 230. 

Riviere, Abbe, 28 ; on Origen, 34 ; 
on the hypostatic union, 240 f. ; 
on the sufferings of Christ, 49, 
263 f. 

Sacraments, mediaeval idea of, 91, 
108; in relation to reconciliation, 

314 *• 

Sacrifice, religious category of, 29 f., 
55 f. ; as applied to death of Christ, 
160 f. 

Sanctification. See under Justifica- 
tion. 

Sanday and Headlam, quoted, 137, 

I5ii 153. 

Satan. See under Devil. 

Satisfaction, as employed by Tertul- 
lian, 46 f ., 67 ; by Augustine, 58 ; by 
Anselm, 69 f., 76 f. ; by Aquinas, 
87 f., 89 f.; by Protestant theol- 
ogy* 93 £» by Grotius, no f. ; 
meaning of term, 48 ; ambiguity of 
term, 48, 76 f. ; and punishment, 
87, 94; made by Christ to God, 
102 f., 161 f. 

Saviour, Grotius' conception of Christ 
as, 98 ; Christ as, 116. 

Schleiermacher, on the church, 116 
f. ; on the preparation for Chris- 
tianity, 125 ; on the incarnation, 
183. 

Seneca, quoted, 30. 

Servant, the suffering, 139. 

Shakespeare, quoted, 205. 

Sin, twofold effect of, 52 ; the problem 
of, 67 f., 159; seriousness of, 73 f. ; 
in relation to human nature, 147 f. ; 
sense of, 189 f., 324 f. ; responsi- 
bility for, 191 f. ; divine reaction 
against, 203 f. ; Biblical doctrine 
of, 210 f. ; followed by death, 209, 



[336] 



INDEX 



229 f., 275 f. ; not inevitable, 248 
f. ; divine condemnation of, 248 f ., 
270 f. ; pardonable and unpardon- 
able, 218 f. ; definition of, 223; at- 
titude of Jesus to, 258 f. ; conse- 
quences of, 224 f., 325 f. 

Socinus, theology of, 97 f., 108. 

Son of Man, 138 f. 

Spinoza, 3, 183. 

Spirit, doctrine of the Holy, 166, 169, 
307 f. 

Stade, quoted, 122. 

Strauss, 104. 

Substitute, Christ as our, 106, 118, 
282. 

Suffering, in relation to sin, 212 f. ; 
of Christ, 112. 

Supper, the Lord's, 140, 320 f. 

Supplicium, 78. 



Tertullian, on atonement, 44 f., 51, 

58. 
Testament, the New, value of, 8-9, 

26 f. ; religious ideas of, 121 f., 

283 f., 287; unity of, 122 f. 
Testament, the Old, 122 f. 
Theology, irrelevant speculations of 

Catholic, 241 f., 264-266, 297 f.; 



defects of Protestant, 92, 109 f., 
296 f. 

Thomasius, 44, 90. 

Time and eternity, 168-169. 

Tradition, function of Christian, 18- 
20, 323. 

Trent, the Council of, on the sacra- 
ments, 91, 217; on justification, 93 
f., 96, 298. 

Troltsch, quoted, 8. 

Union, of Christ and His people, 52 
f., 88 f., 119, 173, 305; of Chris- 
tians and Christ, 304 f. 

VlCARIOUSNESS, 90, 1 1 8. 
Virgil, quoted, 2. 

Westminster Confession, on free 
grace, 101 ; on human depravity, 
199; on salvation of infants, 217. 

White, Douglas, quoted, 16. 

Wordsworth quoted, 202 f., 205 f., 
279. 

Wrath of God, real and objective, 
142 f.; how far eschatological, 146 
f., 227 f. 

ZACCHiEUS, 14 f. 



(2) TEXTS 

{Those specially discussed are marked with an asterisk) 



Genesis 

iii. 1 f., 
Leviticus 

xxvi. 41, 
Numbers 

xv. 22 f., 
1 Samuei 

iii. 14, . 
Nehemiah 

viii. 10, 
Psalms 

Ixxiii. 23-24, 

ciii. 10, 

cxxxix. 1 f. 
Isaiah 

xxii. 12 f., 

1 iii. 12, 



PAGE 

41, 2IO-2I I 

227, 325 

220 

219 

• 309 

331-332 

225 

. 188* 



219-220 
• 139 



Jeremiah 

xviii.-xix., 

xxiii. 6, 

xxxi. 31 f., . 
Joel 

ii. 25, . 
Micah 

vii. 18, 
Wisdom of Solomon 

xvi. 24, 
Matthew 

vi. 12, . 

viii. 17, 

xi. 27 f., . 

xii. 41, 

xviii. 15 f., 

xviii. 23 f., . 

xxvi. 28, 



[337] 



PAGE 

219 
107 
140 

225 

22 

212 

133* 

255* 

IO, 138 

249 

134 £ 

136 f * 

140* 



THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF RECONCILIATION 



Mark 

ii. 5, ii, 
11. 17, . 
iii- 28-30, 
x. 45, • 

Luke 

vii. 36-50, 

vii. 41 f., 

xv. 10 f., 

xix. 1 -10, 

xxiii. 28, 

xxiii. 34, 

xxiii. 43, 
John 

i. 29, . 

111. 5, . 

iv. 6, . 

v. 14, . 

ix. 2, . 

xv. 13, . 

xviii. 8, 
Acts 

ii. 11, . 

ii. 38, . 

ni. 15, . 

in 17, . 

v. 31, • 

viii. 14 f., 

xix. 2 f., 

xxii. 16, 
Romans 

i. 16 f., 

i. 28, . 

i. 32, . 

iii. 5, . 

111. 19, . 

iii. 21 f., 149 
v. 1 f., 

v. 3, • 
v. 5, . 

v. 9, • 

v. 11, . 

v. 12 f., 

v. 18, . 
vi. 1 f., 

vi. 6, . 

vi. 10, . 

vi. 11, . 

vi. 21, . 

vi. 23, . 

vii. 9, . 
vii. 24, 

viii. 1, . 



PAGE 



f.,* 



225 

. 253 f- 

221 

• 141, 254 

. . 58 

.13-14,* 132 
. 132 f. 

• 135 
.14-15,* 254 

18, 130 
18, 130, 220 

18, 130 



. 


175 f 


-, 130 


. 


. 


318 


• 


. 


*7 


. 


. 


213 


. 


. 


213* 


. 


. 


79 


• 


• 


18 


. . 


. 


308 


• 


. 


3i8 


• 


. 


249 


. 


. 


220 


. 


. 


249 


. 


. 


3i8 


• 


. 


318 


• 


• 


315 


142 f., 


•287 


• 


144 


, 190 


. 144, 


146 


277 


• 


. 


146 


• 


. 


H7 


152 *,« 


165 


287 


124, 


1 68, 


294 


> 


. 


178 


. 


. 


309 


• 


. 


227 


141, 


239, 


290 


. 


200, 


210 


. 


. 


297 


246, 28 


«, 3H f.* 


. 


. 


3i6 


. 


246- 


H7* 


• 


. 


317 


• 


• 


277 


. 


. 


202 


. 


. 276* 


124, 148, 


196 


• 


. 


168 



Romans 

viii. 3 f., 
vm. 9- 1 1, 
viii. 28, 
viii. 32, 
viii. 33 f, 
viii. 38 f., 

1 Corinthians 
i. 18, . 
ii. 15, . 
111. 21, . 
vi. 11, . 
vii. 23, 
ix. 24-27, 

X. I f., . 

xii 1-3, 
xiv. 16, 
xv. 3 f., 
xv. 44-49, 
xv. 49, 
xv - 53, 

2 Corinthians 
v. 17, . 
v. 18-20, 
v. 20, . 
v. 21, . 

Galatians 
ii. 20, 
iii. 1, . 
iii. 13, . 
v. 5, • 
vi. 7, • 

* J 1 : IS ' • 

■Ephesians 

ii. 14 f., 
Philippians 

iv. 11, . 

Colossians 

i. 16, . 

1. 20, . 

i. 20-22, 

i. 24, . 

1 Thessalonians 

i. 1, . 

i. 6, . 

1. 10, . 

1 Timothy 

»• 5, • 

™. vi * ** * 

Titus 

iii. 5, . 
Hebrews 
i. 1. 



99 



PAGE 
• .247 f.* 

• 3" 
. 177 

• 179 

285, 294, 330 
J 78, 294, 3 3 of. 



287 
324 
177 
3i5 
323 
293 
320* 

3" 

308 

*, 171 

200 

33i* 

43 



166, 



297, 



122 



302 



141 



[338] 



288 
141 
239 
243 

f -» 307 

18 

167 

169* 

225 

288 

177 

178 

182 

177 

*-> 327 

326 

176 
309 
227 

55 
187 

318 
27 



INDEX 



PAGE 



Hebrews 
ii. 10, . 
ii. ii, . 
ii. 14, . 
vi. 4-6, 
x. 28 f., 
xii. 2, . 

1 Peter 

iii. 17 f., 

2 Peter 

iii. 9, . 



228 



PAGE 





i John 




. 249 


ii. 2, . 


. 175 


71 


ii. 28, . 


. 294 


• 173* 


iii. 1, . 


. 231 


221 


iii. 16, 


326 


222 


iv. 10, . 


175, 280 


. 249 


iv. 17, 


. 294 




v. 16 f., 


. 222* 


171 f* 


Revelation 






i. 5-6, • 


. 133 



[339] 









V"'^ : 



















^ 



**' "<% 









cv 









LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 478 254 9 



will 



111 11 
H I 

BH 



wm 



m 



ntnfW 

in 



at 



m 




m 




IK 1 

mm 



H 

HB 




